I guess it’s only appropriate that the week of Darwin’s birthday is seeing a bunch of new reports about evolutionary transitions. On Monday there was news about how ancient whales with teeth turned into whales with baleen–thanks to the discovery of a fossil of an ancient whale that appears to have had both teeth and baleen. Today’s news takes us from the sea to the trees–the fossil of a primitive bat. The transition that the ancestors of bats made from scampering shrew-like mammals to masterful flyers has remained particularly mysterious. Today’s new fossil lets us look back further than ever into this transition.

The origin of bats is one of those big questions that attracts scientists like…I suppose like bats