Tylonycteris malayana
Tylonycteris malayana is a bamboo bat in the family Vespertilionidae. Its name was restored to species rank in a 2017 study that separated several geographically and genetically distinct bamboo-bat lineages.[1]
Classification
Chasen named the bat in 1940 from Perak in Peninsular Malaysia. It subsequently came to be treated as a subspecies of Tylonycteris robustula. The 2017 revision applied T. malayana to the group represented in Peninsular Malaysia, southern Indochina and northern India, while retaining T. robustula for the Sundaic island group.[1]
The same study described Tylonycteris tonkinensis from northern Indochina. The two species overlap in measured anatomy, but the study distinguished them using mitochondrial and nuclear DNA. External size alone is therefore an unreliable way to separate them.[1]
Distribution
The July 2026 Mammal Diversity Database lists the species in India and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore. It marks China as uncertain. These are country-level records, not evidence that the bat occupies every habitat within those countries.[2]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Tu, Vuong Tan; Csorba, Gábor; Ruedi, Manuel; Furey, Neil M.; Son, Nguyen Truong; Thong, Vu Dinh; Bonillo, Céline; Hassanin, Alexandre (2017). “Comparative phylogeography of bamboo bats of the genus Tylonycteris (Chiroptera, Vespertilionidae) in Southeast Asia”. European Journal of Taxonomy 274:1–38.
- ↑ Mammal Diversity Database (2026). “Tylonycteris malayana”. Taxonomy and distribution checked against version 2.5, released 28 July 2026.