Brueghel painted a bird-eating bat four centuries before the field documented it

Subtract the dates and the gap gets specific: 389 years from the canvas to the fecal evidence, 414 to the 2025 acoustic work ^[23]. Science News rounds it to 400 ^[2].

The painting fixes one thing well, a date by which somebody knew that a greater noctule takes songbirds. It leaves open where the bat was seen, and how often birds turned up in the diet. Pedro Romero-Vidal, an ecologist at the Donana Biological Station in Seville, said the bat was "completely unexpected" ^[5]. He published the analysis earlier this year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and described the bat as incidental to the main search ^[6]. Science News reports that Brueghel may have heard about the behavior during visits to the bat's home range in Italy ^[22].

The main search is for two other kinds of animal. Romero-Vidal's group has been scanning historic paintings for monkeys and parrots, and he said those animals were often transported from distant places, so their appearance in paintings from different centuries yields interesting ecological information ^[7]. "We've identified more than 1,500 works," he said ^[8]. Repeated depiction shows the artists at least knew of the animals, either from menageries or from other people ^[9].

Other painters were ahead of the written science too. Anna Knaap, an art historian at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, said Maria Sibylla Merian, active in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, was the first to match insects with their host plants ^[10]. Merian's work influenced Carl Linnaeus ^[12]. "She was a scientist ahead of her time," Knaap said ^[11].

For the museum's 2025 exhibition of Rachel Ruysch, Knaap and her colleague Christopher Atkins brought in the Harvard biologist Charles Davis ^[13]. "There's all these little kind of nerdy botanical details that only an expert would know," Davis said ^[14]. He used Ruysch's sepals and anthers to identify particular species and to place their origin in the Dutch colonial territories ^[15].

One of her best-known paintings shows a carrion flower, which mimics the smell and appearance of a dead animal to draw flies, with a swallowtail butterfly moving toward the bloom ^[16]. "I sort of laughed," Davis said ^[17]. Ruysch had probably only ever seen the plant in a botanical garden, away from its usual pollinator ^[18].

Sorting the observed from the invented is the art historians' part of the method. "We look at what visual evidence exists. We make comparisons," Atkins said ^[19]. Within one artist's output he looks for "repeated motifs, which suggests then that that is not necessarily a completely realistic feature" ^[20]. They also compare an artist's original sketches of a landscape with the finished work ^[21].