Bat Families (Chiroptera)

This group gathers taxon/Mammal Families subcategory members that are themselves mammal families belonging to the order Chiroptera, the bats, the only mammal order to have evolved powered, flapping flight rather than the passive gliding seen in a handful of other mammal groups. It spans megabat families such as Pteropodidae, the flying foxes and Old World fruit bats, generally larger-bodied and relying on keen eyesight and smell rather than echolocation to find fruit and nectar, and a considerably larger number of microbat families, generally smaller-bodied, insect-eating specialists that navigate and hunt in darkness using echolocation, emitting high-frequency calls and interpreting the returning echoes to build a detailed picture of their surroundings. Bats make up roughly one in five of all described living mammal species, a scale of diversity exceeded among mammals only by the rodents.