The new species is named Icaronycteris gunnelli (I. gunnelli) after the late Gregg Gunnell, a Duke University paleontologist who died in 2017 and is remembered for his contributions to understanding fossil bats and evolution.
The now extinct I. gunnelli lived in Wyoming approximately 52 million years ago and the current scientific verdict is that bats rapidly diversified across multiple continents during this time in history.. Currently there are more than 1460 living bat species They are found almost everywhere in the world, except for the Earth’s polar regions and some remote islands.
The bat skeleton is about 1.5 inches long and was found near Kemmerer, Wyoming, in the Green River Formation. The formation covers parts of Wyoming, Colorado and Utah, in the United States. Scientists have found more than 30 bat fossils in the last 60 years within the formation; however, until they found this new species, they believed that they were all from the same two extinct species, Icaronycteris index and Onychonycteris finneyi.
“Eocene bats have been known from the Green River Formation since the 1960s. But interestingly, most of the specimens that have emerged from that formation were identified as representatives of a single species, Icaronycteris index , until about 20 years ago, when a second species of bat belonging to another genus has been discovered,” said study co-author Nancy Simmons, curator in charge of the American Museum of Natural History’s Department of Mammalogy.
Simmons helped to describe the second species called Onychonycteris finneyi in 2008 but always thought there might be even more Eocene bats out there.