Ebola Outbreak May Have Begun With Bats in a Dead Tree

The first patient in West Africa’s devastating Ebola outbreak, a 2-year-old boy in Guinea, may have gotten the disease from bats in a dead tree in his village, a new study reports.

Emile Ouamouno, who died last year on Dec. 6, was a resident of Meliandou, a cluster of 31 houses surrounded by farmland. Locals told researchers that kids used to play in a hollow tree about 50 meters (55 yards) from the boy’s home. Children used to catch and play with long-tailed, insect-eating bats that lived in the tree, which has since burned down, according to the study in the journal EMBO Molecular Medicine.