AssetID: 53166905
Headline: UNCAPTIONED: Bat's Amazing! Scientists Unravelling The Evolutionary Secrets Behind Vampires' Bites
Caption: This Halloween, researchers have begun to unravel the secret to how bats evolved their bites - and thus how some evolved to become vampires. There are more than 200 species of noctilionoid bats, the family that includes bloodsucking critters, which live mostly in the American tropics. Yet despite being close relatives, their jaws evolved in wildly divergent shapes and sizes to exploit different food sources - from fruit and insects to more gory fare. Bats’ jaws are actually quite similar to humans, the researchers say - although those with longer jaws have room for more teeth. To find out the evolutionary mechanisms at work, the team used CT scans and other methods to analyse the shapes and sizes of jaws, premolars and molars in more than 100 noctilionoid species. They used mathematical modeling to determine how differences are generated during development. Bats with short jaws - like the vampire subfamily and fruit bats - tended to ditch the middle premolar or the back molar, if not both. The shorter jaw may also explain why many short-faced bats also tended to have wider front molars - and thus how the vampire bats developed their distinctive look. Alexa Sadier, now of the Institute of Evolutionary Science of Montpellier in France, who began this project at the University California, Los Angeles, said “When you have more space, you can have more teeth. But for bats with a shorter space, even though they have a more powerful bite, you simply run out of room for all these teeth” She added: “The first teeth to appear tend to grow bigger since there is not enough space for the next ones to emerge.”
Keywords: Bats,Vampires,Fruit Bats,Animals,Halloween,Feature,Nature,Natural World,Science,Evolution,Animal,Vampire,Wildlife,Research,Offbeat
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