BAT FACES CAN COME IN so many odd shapes and sizes. They might have giant, improbable ears, funky turned-up noses, or mugs so convoluted that they resemble orchids. So there’s something familiar, comforting, almost friendly about dog-faced bats. Until recently, six species of these flying mammals were known to scientists. Now research has added two more to the list: Freeman’s dog-faced bat (Cynomops freemani) in Panama, and the Waorani dog-faced bat (Cynomops tonkigui) in Ecuador.
“Identifying two mammal species new to science is extremely exciting,” Ligiane Moras, lead author of the study, published in Mammalian Biology, told Smithsonian Insider. Moras, a doctoral student at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Brazil, made the discovery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. There, she compared DNA, careful measurements, and field recordings to distinguish the two new varieties.=read more
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