Late Pleistocene bat fossils from Anjohibe Cave, northwestern Madagascar

Abstract

In spite of decades of research on Madagascar's unique and endemic modern fauna, the evolutionary history of the island's bat fauna remains largely unknown. Their origin and evolution is largely unknown because of the nature of the fossil record; the deepest well-dated glimpse of Madagascar's mammal groups comes from only 26,000 years ago. Bat remains have frequently been recovered from paleontological sites, but have been rarely identified or described. It therefore remains unknown whether bats underwent a reduction in species diversity similar to that seen in many of Madagascar's vertebrate clades. Herein I describe a collection of newly discovered subfossil bats from Anjohibe Cave, northwestern Madagascar, some estimated to have been deposited about 80,000 years ago. Five bat genera are represented as subfossil (Rousettus, Eidolon, Hipposideros, Triaenops, and Myotis) with four of these genera present in Anjohibe Cave today. The subfossil material has yielded two new species, indicating that Malagasy bats experienced recent species turnover, paralleling what is seen in much of the island's terrestrial vertebrate fauna. © Museum and Institute of Zoology PAS.