HONOLULU (AP) — Scientists from Honolulu’s Bishop Museum have helped document the existence of second bat species that once lived in the Hawaiian Islands.
HONOLULU (AP) — Scientists from Honolulu’s Bishop Museum have helped document the existence of second bat species that once lived in the Hawaiian Islands.
The Hawaiian hoary bat is the state’s only native land mammal. But a new study says a second bat lived alongside the hoary bat for thousands of years. Researchers believe the second bat went extinct shortly after humans arrived in the islands.
The study appears this week in the journal American Museum Novitates.
Bishop Museum entomologist Francis Howarth co-authored the paper with the late Bishop Museum mammologist Alan Ziegler and Nancy Simmons of the American Museum of Natural History.
Fossils indicate the bat was in the islands from at least 320,000 years ago and survived until at least 1,100 years ago.