Macrotus

Macrotus is a genus of bats in the Neotropical family Phyllostomidae. It is the only member of the subfamily Macrotinae. This genus contains two species, Macrotus californicus commonly known as California leaf-nosed bat and Macrotus waterhousii commonly known as Mexican or Waterhouse's leaf-nosed bat. The range of this family includes the warmer parts of the southwestern United States, Mexico, Central and South America, and the Bahama Islands. Characteristic for the genus are large ears and the name giving triangular skin flap above the nose, the "leaf". The California Leaf-nosed Bat inhabits the arid deserts of the southwestern United States as far north as Nevada, south to Baja California and Sonora, Mexico. The California Leaf-nosed Bat is of medium size, with a total length between 9 and 11 cm Its most distinctive features are the large ears, connected across the forehead. The body is pale grayish brown dorsally with whitish under parts. The pelage (fur) on the body is silky, the hairs on the back about 8 mm, on the front about 6 mm long. The posterior base of the ears are covered with hair of a woolly texture while the interior surface and most of the anterior border shows scattered long hairs.

Macrotus

Uncredited · Public Domain · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.

On record

Recorded, not inferred
Also called
leaf-nosed batPBDB
Sits inside
PhyllostomidaePBDB
Diet
omnivorePBDB, for Phyllostomidae
Life habit
volantPBDB, for Chiroptera
Motility
actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
Environment
terrestrialPBDB, for Chiroptera

Time the record covers

At most 129 thousand years on record.

Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 129 ka and 0 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.

Pleistocene — about 7 of 18 occurrencesPleistoceneHolocene — about 11 of 18 occurrences147 ka–126 ka Mya — about 0.2 occurrences126 ka–105 ka Mya — about 1 occurrence105 ka–84 ka Mya — about 1 occurrence84 ka–63 ka Mya — about 1 occurrence63 ka–42 ka Mya — about 1 occurrence42 ka–21 ka Mya — about 1 occurrence21 ka–0 Mya — about 12 occurrences629 ka0 Mya

18 occurrences of Macrotus on record, most of them in the Holocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.

When

18 occurrences

These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.

Macrotus and its relatives

Holocene

Where Macrotus and its relatives were recorded in the Holocene.

Found in the same rock

131 taxa

The Paleobiology Database records 18 sites for Macrotus, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.

This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.

Entered from

6 references

Each of the 18 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.

Media and terms

Media content1

Picture of Macrotus

Credit
nobody named on the record
Licence
Public Domain
Commercial use
the licence allows it

No 3D scan of Macrotus was found in Sketchfab.

Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.

The description on this site

Licence
CC BY-SA 4.0

This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.

Keep going

What may have been alongside itPhyllostomidae through timeFormations of the HoloceneThe world it lived on

Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Gray 1843