New Discovery - Brilliantly Striped South Sudanese Species Dubbed "Panda Bat" - Mongabay [View all]

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Scientists have uncovered a rare, brilliantly-striped bat in South Sudan that has yielded new secrets after close study. Working in Bangangai Game Reserve during July of last year, biologist DeeAnn Redeer and conservationist Adrian Garsdie with Fauna & Flora International (FFI) came across an unmissable bat, which has been dubbed by various media outlets as the "badger bat" and the "panda bat."

"My attention was immediately drawn to the bat's strikingly beautiful and distinct pattern of spots and stripes. It was clearly a very extraordinary animal, one that I had never seen before," DeeAnn Reeder with Bucknell University says. "I knew the second I saw it that it was the find of a lifetime."

After collecting a specimen, Reeder took the bat back to the U.S. and confirmed that it belongs to a species that was discovered over seventy years ago in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in 1939. However, that wasn't the end of the story.

"After careful analysis, it is clear that it doesn't belong in the genus that it's in right now," Reeder explains. "Its cranial characters, its wing characters, its size, the ears—literally everything you look at doesn't fit. It's so unique that we need to create a new genus."
Read more at http://news.mongabay.com/2013/0410-hance-bat-genus.html#hX2GpwrrpOAi6XsZ.99

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