Aegyptonycteris ("Egyptian bat") is a genus of extinct bat from the Late Eocene of North Africa. It is currently known from a single specimen (holotype CGM 83740) from the Birket Qarun Formation in the Fayum Depression in western Egypt.
Aegyptonycteris ("Egyptian bat") is a genus of extinct bat from the Late Eocene of North Africa. It is currently known from a single specimen (holotype CGM 83740) from the Birket Qarun Formation in the Fayum Depression in western Egypt.
Aegyptonycteris is notable both its large size, comparable to the larger modern bat species, as well due to its omnivorous diet, as opposed to the mostly insectivorous diets of other Eocene bats (and the majority of modern species). This makes it a remarkable example of early chiropteran speciation, having not only attained a rather large size but also specialised towards a drastically different ecological niche from its contemporaries.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).