Onychonycteris known species, hence "Onychonycteris" meaning "clawed bat". The specific epithet is a tribute to the fossil prospector and preparator who discovered it, Bonnie Finney. "Onychonycteris finneyi" was the strongest evidence so far in the debate on whether bats developed echolocation before or after they evolved the ability to fly. "O. finneyi" had well-developed wings, and could clearly fly, but lacked the enlarged cochlea of all extant echolocating bats, closer resembling the old world fruit bats which do not echolocate. This indicates that early bats could fly before they could echolocate. However, an independent evaluation of the "Onychonycteris" reference fossil in
Human echolocation since at least the 1950s. In earlier times, human echolocation was sometimes described as "facial vision" or "obstacle sense," as it was believed that the proximity of nearby objects caused pressure changes on the skin. Only in the 1940s did a series of experiments performed in the Cornell Psychological Laboratory show that sound and hearing, rather than pressure changes on the skin, were the mechanisms driving this ability. The field of human and animal echolocation was surveyed in book form as early as 1959. See also White, et al. (1970) Many blind individuals passively use natural environmental echoes to sense