Flitting swiftly through the darkness above the tropical forest canopy in Central and South America, a group of cute little bats with dog-like faces have long been hiding a big secret. Now, their secret is out.
For more than 50 years, scientists believed that only six species of the fast flying, insect-eating mammals known as dog-faced bats existed. That number has now increased to eight with the discovery of two new species, the Freeman’s dog-faced bat (Cynomops freemani), collected by Smithsonian researchers in Panama in 2012 and the Waorani dog-faced bat (Cynomops tonkigui) from Ecuador. Both new species are described today in the journal Mammalian Biology.
“Identifying two mammal species new to science is extremely exciting,” says Ligiane Moras, lead author of the study and who did part of this work as a fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) in Washington, D.C. during her doctoral studies at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil.
“After characterizing the body shapes of 242 dog-faced bats from museum collections across the Americas and Europe, comparing their DNA, and adding in field observations including sound recordings, we consider there to be eight species in this group, two of them new to science,” Moras says.
Read more at Smithsonian Insider
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