[Youngblood]

Did you know there were no bats on Earth until we emerged from the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago?

One of the more idiotic statements I've read in the last while.

[Max in Utah]

Did you know there were no bats on Earth until we emerged from the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago?

One of the more idiotic statements I've read in the last while.

I caught that one too. Bats bave been around for millions of years, probably since the days of the dinosaurs. The author casts doubt on the rest of his article with this piece of misinformation.

[The Coopster]

Why?

[SmithL]

Bat evolution linked to warming

Bats are an amazingly diverse group of mammals (Image: Paul Bates)

A sharp rise in global temperatures about 50 million years ago may have been responsible for the evolution of bats, Science magazine reports.

This warming is linked to an explosion in the diversity of other mammals, but little was known about bat evolution.

New DNA data traces the origin of four major bat lineages to a brief period in the Eocene Epoch when the average global temperature rose by about 7C.

Bats make up 20% of mammals, yet their evolutionary history is poorly known.

The scientists, led by Emma Teeling from University College Dublin, Ireland, estimate that around 60% of the bat fossil record is missing.

Writing in Science, the international team of researchers propose that bats originated in the ancient landmass of Laurasia, possibly in an area now located in North America.

Insect prey

The gene sequencing data suggests bats split away on their own evolutionary path about 52-50 million years ago, at a time when the Earth experienced an event known as the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum....

BBC Story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4213495.stm

[Lancey Howard]

Did you know there were no bats on Earth until we emerged from the last Ice Age 12,000 years ago?

One of the more idiotic statements I've read in the last while.

I agree. Baseball wasn't even invented until the mid-1800s.

[Always Right]

One of the more idiotic statements I've read in the last while.

The author is definitely confused on that one, which is too bad because he makes a few good points and that comment dismisses everything else he said. What he said is probably true for particular regions like Indiana-Ohio-Michigan which were glacier covered about 15,000 years ago, and now have large bat populations. But defintely was not true for the whole earth.