Scientists discovered a new retrovirus “fossil” found in the common vampire bat which is homologous to retroviruses in rodents and primates. The results suggest the recent circulation of an active ...

Reporting today (February 19) in Nature Ecology & Evolution, researchers describe twice the transposon content in the genome of the common vampire bat, Desmodus rotundus, compared to other bats’ ...

Mexican drug cartels are hindering the work of a group of scientists who are conducting research into the venom of vampire bats, as part of an effort to identify potential new treatments for a host of ...

A roost of common vampire bats, Desmodus rotundus. Credit: Uwe Schmidt/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 Vampire bats have complex social networks, forming relationships with other bats that can vary on ...

It’s hard to tell who vampire bats like to feed on just by looking at their feces since they dine exclusively on blood. But now, researchers analyzing DNA isolated from bat droppings reveal that they ...

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Novel therapeutics, even when they come from unexpected places, are a welcome addition to the armamentarium of drugs available to treat diseases. Now, a team of researchers from The University of ...

In a recent study posted to the bioRxiv* preprint server, researchers retrospectively assessed the association between climate change and disease spillover risks triggered by bat distribution changes ...

The number of vampire bats, which transmit rabies and are a concern for livestock breeders, may be increasing in Brazil and the Americas along with growth in the populations of invasive feral pigs and ...

The common vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus) is an example of a bat that can live more than four times longer than a nonflying placental mammal of the same body size. Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert!

Desmodus rotundus is one of only three species of bats that feed exclusively on blood. Commonly called vampire bats, these nocturnal flying mammals have a body length of roughly 3 in and a wingspan up ...