A picture of me pondering the bat 🦇

I apologize for not getting to you sooner (I was very busy yesterday and today with offline life stuff and setting up the Bat of the YEar 2025 tournament).

Here, have one of my favorite bats, the Evening Bat, and a fluffy thumbless bat. I hope your Sunday was much better than your Saturday.

image description: a brown bat with dark wings, one is outstretched for the camera while it is being held by a researcher wearing one black glove. image source: US Army, via wikipedia

Thumbless Bat Skull (Furipterus horrens)

Since there weren’t many good reference photos of the thumbless bat available (a tragedy!!), I took a shot at its bizarre-looking skull. Evolution has done to many bats what man has cruelly wrought on domestic dogs- though the difference is that it actually works for the bats.

The thumbless bat, as you might imagine from looking at this skull, has a very squished-in face, with fur and skin obscuring the extreme bend above the eyes. This might aid it in echolocation by turning its head into a radar dish, similar to an owl’s. There are definitely a lot of bats that seem to have converged on the flattened-face design. But that isn’t an Official Scientist’s Opinion, just mine.

I should mention that despite their common name, thumbless bats actually DO have thumbs, just reduced ones with tiny, functionless claws. This brings up the question of how they crawl, since most bats use their thumbs like pitons while moving around on their roosts. The answer may be that they just don’t crawl that much- a creature thoroughly adapted to life in the air.

Another fun fact about thumbless bats: their nipples are located on their abdomen, rather than under their armpits like most bats. This means the babies have to orient themselves head-up on their mothers (who are hanging upside-down, of course) to nurse. But how do they do this without functional thumbs to hold on with? I have so many questions that the internet cannot answer.

Finally, please enjoy this thumbless bat art by famed naturalist Ernst Haeckel, circa 1904: