Introduction

Bats are unique among mammals for their ability to fly. A substantial body of research has focused on understanding how they do so, and in 1990, Norberg's landmark volume provided an up-to-date understanding of diverse aspects of bat flight (Norberg, 1990). Building on work accomplished before 1990, our understanding of bat flight has changed significantly in the last two decades, and warrants an updated review. For example, many hypotheses about how bats fly were based either on aircraft aerodynamics or on studies of birds. In some respects, these predictions did fit bats well. However, recent advances in the study of bat flight have also revealed important differences between winged mammals and other fliers. Although we have, of course, always known that a bat is neither a bird nor a plane, the significance of the differences among bats and all other flyers are only now becoming clear.

In this chapter, we provide an overview of the morphology of bats from the perspective of their unique capacity for powered flight. Throughout the chapter, we provide references to classic literature concerning animal flight and the bat flight apparatus, and direct readers to sources of additional information where possible. We focus on relatively newer work that over the last 20 years has begun to change the ways in which we understand how bats carry out their remarkable flight behavior, and that has altered the way we understand the structural underpinnings of bat flight.