Carlos
Albuquerque
Guest Writer
Lucas
Lima
Staff Artist
As a group, bats are unfairly maligned as flying monsters. Unless you’re a bug or a banana, most bats are fairly harmless. Nonetheless, as nocturnal animals with features considered aberrant by human beings, bats have captured the imagination of cultures around the world as flying demons. And one particular extinct genus doesn’t ease the mind when it comes to these stereotypes.
Few prehistoric animals can be as lucky as the bat Necromantis. It has just such a wonderfully over-the-top name, literally “death eater.” Nothing could be more perfect than a monstrous name for what was, in life, a cute flying mammal.
Necromantis fossils were first found in Eocene age rocks in France, but more recently they have also turned up in Tunisia, showing a wide range across the eastern hemisphere. A variety of other bat taxa can be found in the early Cenozoic of Africa and Europe, but few are present in both continents, even during the various periods of faunal exchange between both continents.
