Drawing in the Bat

Having a lack of popular references there was no reason to talk about them yesterday. Instead, we come back today to look one of the only well illustrated restorations of this prehistoric bat. The majority of illustrations refer to modern bats to illustrate their interpretations of these older bats. Only one set of illustrations appears to draw its inspiration directly from the skull. The shape of the illustrated heads are what gives away this inspiration of course, with the properly drawn animals possessing a more elongate head than modern bats; the poorly drawn Icaronycteris pieces have a shortened bat face with large flat noses. The ears of either version are open to even more interpretation, but it appears that almost all of these have been illustrated as typical bat ears. This makes sense, though, given that Icaronycteris is hypothesized to have been capable of echolocation. The tail, however, is longer than the legs in the fossil and all of the interpretations.