Before I get into bats, let's be sure you know what a mammal is. You don't have to worry about whether it's got warm blood or a big brain. All you really need to know about mammals is that they have hair at some time during their lives and feed their young on breast milk. And notice the weasel words there: have hair "at some time during their lives". Some Cetacea, the whales and porpoises, for example, have hair only in utero which they shed before birth, but that qualifies as having hair at some time during their lives.

Mammals that have both elongated fingers and forearms are bats. Their upper arms are not that much disproportionate. Look at your own forearm and imagine bringing it out to about double its length, lengthening your fingers by about three or four times, and stretching out the membranes that you already have between your fingers to the ends of your fingers and you would have a bat wing.

All bats fly but not all mammals that have "flying" in their names fly. For example, flying squirrels, flying foxes, and flying lemurs don't fly; they're gliders. But all bats fly, there's no exception.

The oldest fossils of bats which go back to the Paleocene were perfectly good bats. We really don't know when bats evolved. There may have been bats with dinosaurs. We don't know that there weren't. Back at that time, there were moths with ears. If, as often happens in evolution, there's a reason for moths to have ears, a good reason would be to evade bats. So moths back at the dinosaurs time had ears. Were they for evading bats?

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