Scientists: Bats and coronaviruses have been evolving together over millions of years

Bats do a lot of good for the world-they pollinate plants, they eat disease-carrying insects, and they help disperse seeds that help with the regeneration of tropical forest trees. Bats and a range of other mammal groups are also natural carriers of coronaviruses. Scientists compared the different kinds of coronaviruses living in 36 bat species from the western Indian Ocean and nearby areas of Africa. They found different groups of bats at the genus, and, in some cases, the family level had their unique strains of coronavirus. It reveals that bats and coronaviruses have been evolving together for millions of years.

"We found that there's a deep evolutionary history between bats and coronaviruses. Developing a better understanding of how coronaviruses evolved can help us build public health programs in the future," says Steve Goodman, MacArthur Field Biologist at Chicago's Field Museum.

According to scientists, the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which caused the global pandemic of COVID-19 disease, is a close relative of coronaviruses that affect horseshoe bats living in China, South-East Asia, and Africa.

As the history of the last half-century shows, bat-winged mammals have been the source of many other dangerous viruses, including Ebola, SARS, and Middle East respiratory syndrome.