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
Echolocation jamming chemicals from their host plants as caterpillars and keep them in their tissues through adulthood. Roeder agreed with Dunning’s findings. James Fullard and colleagues published findings in 1979, and 1994 arguing in favor of the jamming hypothesis based on the acoustic characteristics of moth clicks, however this hypothesis was still widely debated in the literature during that time. In the 1990s experiments were conducted broadcasting clicks to bats performing echolocation tasks on a platform and with neurophysiological methods to demonstrate a plausible mechanism for jamming. The researchers concluded that most tiger moths do not produce enough sound to jam bat