The recent discovery of the first mammal that deposits significant amounts of carotenoid pigments in the skin has highlighted the presence of conspicuous yellow coloration in the bare skin of some bats. This is patent in the subfamily Stenodermatinae, where many species build tents with plant leaves for communal roosting at daytime. Here, authors hypothesized that tent?roosting may have driven the evolution of yellow skin coloration in this group of bats.

Bats are assumed not to use vision for communication, despite recent evidence of their capacity for color vision. The possibility that bats use color traits as signals has thus been overlooked. Some tent-roosting bats have a potential for visual signaling because they exhibit bright yellow skin, a trait that in birds often acts as a sexual signal. The authors searched for evidence of sexual dichromatism in the yellow bare skin of Honduran white bats Ectophylla alba.

Paleo-colour scientists have recently made the transition from describing melanin-based colouration in fossil specimens to inferring life-history traits of the species involved. Two such cases correspond to counter-shaded dinosaurs: dark-coloured due to melanins dorsally, and light-coloured ventrally. This review points out that colour reconstruction of fossils based on the shape of preserved microstructures—the majority of paleo-colour studies involve melanin granules—is not...

Animals cannot synthesize carotenoid pigments de novo, and must consume them in their diet. Most mammals, including humans, are indiscriminate accumulators of carotenoids but inefficiently distribute them to some tissues and organs. To date, no mammal has been known to have evolved physiological mechanisms to incorporate and deposit carotenoids in the skin or hair. Here it is shown that the Honduran white bat colors its skin bright yellow with the deposition of the xanthophyll lutein.