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“Bats—in a world of echoes” is about more than one fifth of all mammalian life on the planet. With a timeline dating back to the dinosaurs, it takes you on a journey to exotic locations around the globe and tells a story not just about bats but about a world of sound, about lives lived in darkness, and about mastering the air. Bats make up their own order of mammals and are in fact more related to carnivores, ungulates, and whales than rodents, contrary to what one might suspect given the old English names “flittermouse” or “rattle-mouse”. The modern English “bat” ultimately derives from the Old Norse leðrblakka, which literally translates as “leather flapper”. We currently know about 1300 species of bats and are constantly discovering new ones. They are found over almost the entire planet and are wonderfully diverse in terms of feeding habits and lifestyles, especially in the tropics. There are bats that are fruit and nectar specialists and bats that hunt fish, frogs, birds, and scorpions. In the north, all bats eat insects and other arthropods, while in tropical Latin America there are bats that can live solely on blood, a feat that has earned them—the vampires—considerable notoriety, judging by all the myths and legends that surround them. Some of the world’s smallest mammals are bats, while the largest flying foxes have a wingspan that can reach almost two meters. What they all have in common is the capacity of flight. Bats are the only actively flying mammals, a characteristic that has shaped their appearance more than anything else. Most obvious, of course, are the wings, with the elongated digits that stretch out into flexible, dragonlike wings that propel their lightweight bodies through the air.