Monday I posted a set of pictures showing an Arkansas fossil. Were you able to figure it out. Check below for the answer.

This skull and mandible comes from the Madrean Archipelago Biodiversity Assessment (MABA) website. I couldn’t find a good picture of an actual fossil, so I used this modern example instead. Below is a living version.

Myotis leibii, Eastern small-footed bat. Credit: Gary Peeples/USFWS

The skull is that of Myotis leibii, the eastern small-footed Myotis. Myotis bats are also called mouse-eared bats, the most famous of which is the little brown bat, Myotis lucifugus. The other fossil bat in Arkansas is the big brown bat, which is not in the genus Myotis at all. It is in the genus Eptesicus (E. fuscus specifically).

I have talked about E. fuscus before, where I talked a bit about bats in general. I didn’t go into their phylogeny at all, so I will talk about that here. Bats as a whole belong to the order Chiroptera, which is the sister group to a group called Fereuungulata. That group includes artiodactyls, cetaceans (whales and dolphins), carnivorans, and pangolins. Altogether, Chiroptera and Fereuungulata form the horribly named Scrotifera. Why do I say it is horribly named? Besides the fact that naming such a large group after scrotums is a bit odd, take a look at the simplified mammal phylogeny illustrated by Darren Naish.

Notice what is NOT in Scrotifera. That’s right. Primates, such as us. Yes, we are more closely related to rats and squirrels than we are to bats, dolphins, or cats and dogs. We are also not included in the group named for a feature we possess.

Both Myotis and Eptesicus are Vesper bats, meaning they belong in the family Vespertilionidae, along with over 300 other bat species. When it comes to diversity, mammals could easily be described as rodents, bats and their less common relatives, seeing as how those two groups include 60% of all mammals. Vesper bats are in the suborder Microchiroptera, the micro bats. The other suborder, Megachiroptera, is composed of the fruit bats like the flying foxes. The two suborders are rather lopsided in numbers, with just under 200 species in Megachiroptera and over 1000 in the Microchiroptera. This is the traditional classification at any rate.

There is another phylogeny that splits it up slightly differently and gives them different names. Megachiroptera has become Yinpterochiroptera and includes the horseshoe bats in the group called Rhinolophoidea as well as the lesser and greater false vampire bats in the genus Megaderma. Everything else that was in Microchiroptera  is in Yangochiroptera.

You can read more about it here, or in the original paper here.

So returning to the vesper bats, these include most of the bats people are likely to run into, which is why  the bats in this group are sometimes called common bats. Most of the bats in this group have rather plain faces and are insectivores. Myotis leibii itself belongs in the group Myotinae, marked in the red box in the phylogeny below, which was also put together by Darren Naish.

The interesting thing about this is that Eptesicus, the big brown bat, is in the serotine clade, up near the top of the tree and quite a distance away from Myotis, the little brown bat. Eptesicus is also sometimes called a house bat, but the house bats are in the group Scotophini, which while still in Vespertilioninae, is not closely related within the group. This is part of the reason common names can get confusing. just because the common names are similar and overlap doesn’t necessarily mean they are at all closely related.

M. leibii itself lives in forests throughout eastern North America, in spotty patches from Canada to Arkansas and Georgia. It is a small bat, weighing only about 5 grams and with a wingspan of less than 10 cm. Unusually for its size, it is long lived, living as long as 12 years and tolerates the cold better than most other bats, so spends less time in hibernation than other bats.

The fossil record of M. leibii is sparse, although the fossil record for Myotis in general is fairly good for bats. According to molecular data, the genus Myotis first appeared roughly 16 Mya, with the North American clade splitting off no more than 9 Mya. However, the actual fossil data indicates Myotis is far older, with the earliest known Myotis fossil being 33 Mya to the earliest Oligocene, although in North America, the record only extends to the late Miocene no more than 23 Mya. Interestingly, the fossil record for M leibii demonstrates a range far greater than the current distribution, with fossils being found as far as Oregon. In Arkansas, fossils are limited to one spot, which happens to be the same spot Eptesicus has been found: pleistocene deposits within the Conard fissure. If one looks in the original publication of Conard Fissure by Barnum Brown, one will find Vespertilio fuscus and Myotis subulatus, but both of those names have been changed in the intervening 110 years, to Eptesicus fuscus and Myotis leibii.