The scientific name for bats is Chiroptera which means - cheir (hand) + pteron (wing), or “hand wing
Scientists believe that bats first appeared 65-100 million years ago, the same time as the dinosaurs. The earliest-known megabats lived thirty-five million years ago. The oldest known fossil microbat, called Icaronycteris index, was found near Yellowstone in Wyoming. It lived approximately 50 million years ago
Approximately seventy percent of bats eat insects. To get an idea how much they love insects, an average bat can eat more than six hundred bugs in an hour, which is like an ordinary human eating something like twenty pizzas a night. Vampire bats are the only mammals that live entirely on blood. The pipistrelle bat weighs less than two pennies and is only as long as a person’s little finger. Yet it can eat 3,000 insects in one night
The world’s largest bat is the giant golden-crowned flying fox, a rare fruit bat. It has a wingspan of five to six feet.
The bumblebee bat is the smallest bat in the world and lives in Thailand. Approximately the size of a bumblebee, the bat weighs less than a penny. It may be the smallest existing mammal. Due to habitat loss, it is listed as critically endangered.
Three states in the U.S. have an official state bat. Virginia has the Virginia big-eared bat and Texas and Oklahoma have the Mexican free-tailed bat.
The Bracken Bat Cave in Texas is the largest bat colony in the world. Over twenty million bats live in there, which is about twice as many bats than the number of people living in New York—one of the world’s most populated cities.
Bats can live more than 30 years and can fly at speeds of up to 60 mph.A bat’s echolocation is so tuned that it can detect objects as thin as a human hair. Bats can hear frequencies between 20 Hz and 120,000 Hz.