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They were unrelated to today’s four groups of gliding mammals: flying squirrels in North America and Asia, Africa’s scaly-tailed gliders, Australia’s marsupial sugar gliders and Southeast Asia’s colugos.

Judging from hand and foot bones, the scientists concluded the two roosted, using all four limbs to hang from trees like modern colugos, and gripping tree branches with their feet like bats.

But gliders such as the colugo and flyers such as bats are on completely different branches of the vertebrate tree — and their ecologies are completely different.

The data packs revealed that each colugo glided an average of a quarter-mile each night.

But by calculating how much energy the colugos used when doing both, researchers were surprised to find that gliding used 1.5 times more energy.