Looking for something you haven’t seen before? Here’s some remarkable footage via the BBC’s “Inside the Bat Cave” documentary. They take a look at bat flight, and how a bat’s wing shape and flight pattern is vital to its behavioral strategies. But stick around for the x-ray footage of a bat in flight, where you can see how a bat’s wings are the equivalent of a hand with extended finger bones.

David Crotty

David Crotty

David Crotty is a Senior Consultant at Clarke & Esposito, a boutique management consulting firm focused on strategic issues related to professional and academic publishing and information services. Previously, David was the Editorial Director, Journals Policy for Oxford University Press. He oversaw journal policy across OUP’s journals program, drove technological innovation, and served as an information officer. David acquired and managed a suite of research society-owned journals with OUP, and before that was the Executive Editor for Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, where he created and edited new science books and journals, along with serving as a journal Editor-in-Chief. He has served on the Board of Directors for the STM Association, the Society for Scholarly Publishing and CHOR, Inc., as well as The AAP-PSP Executive Council. David received his PhD in Genetics from Columbia University and did developmental neuroscience research at Caltech before moving from the bench to publishing.

Discussion

3 Thoughts on "X-Ray Bat Flight"

While watching this, I myself wondering what adaptational benefit the shape of the wings might have provided. Bat wings are shaped so distinctively that they’re instantly recognizable as bat wings and the shape, with its arc forward appearance, doesn’t seem to be the inevitable result of the skeletal structure. Lovely video and good commentary.

Cheer to our talented, peer mammals who can clearly do something that we can’t.

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