The much-maligned bat may soon be earning praise from climate scientists, after a discovery that the winged mammals have dropped thousands of years of data in caves throughout the world.
That data is waiting to be mined – but only by researchers willing to scour through millenniums of bat poop.
According to Louis J. Maher Jr., a retired professor of geology and geophysics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, guano, or bat dung, can be used to examine ancient environments in a manner analogous, or even preferable, to lake sediment or peat.