A 17th-Century Flemish Painting Hints at Bird-Hunting Bats
TL;DR
A 1611 painting Air by Jan Brueghel the Elder, renowned for its detailed menagerie, appears to depict a bat catching a bird in flight. A recent PNAS paper argues this could be the first direct visual evidence of bird-eating behavior by greater noctule bats, suggesting Brueghel may have captured real natural history observations and highlighting a novel link between art and historical ecology.
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- A discovery about this bat’s diet was hiding in a Renaissance painting Science News
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