The first bats were European.

MEXICO CITY — La Jornada’s science pages on Thursday, citing Europa Press, reported a study that moves the origin of bats. The animals, the paper said, arose in Europe about 65 million years ago. Earlier work had placed that beginning in Asia, Africa, or the Americas.

The first descendants, the report said, then spread across Africa. The story ran under a photograph of a bat in flight and sat on the same page as a short note on artificial intelligence. The Science desk files the fossil claim, not the policy one.

Sixty-five million years is the boundary after the dinosaurs. If the study holds, the first flying mammals of this line were European, and the other continents came later.