Turkmen Long-eared Bat

About this species

Size

Body about 5.2–5.5cm; forearm 4.2–4.55cm; wingspan about 30cm

Weight

10–15g

Habitat

Arid landscapes

Range

Arid western Central Asia (Ustyurt and Mangyshlak in Kazakhstan, Zaunguz Karakum and Kopet Dag in Turkmenistan) and arid areas of western and southern Mongolia

The Turkmen long-eared bat weighs 10–15 grams, with a body of about 52–55 millimetres, a forearm of 42–45.5 millimetres and a wingspan of about 30 centimetres. The skin folds behind the nostrils typical of long-eared bats are weakly developed and the tubercle above the eye is small. The fur is dense and mostly pale, white on the belly and buff on the back, with a patch of bare, unpigmented skin on the lower back near the tail base. The membranes are translucent and, like the face mask, unpigmented. The skull is proportionally wide with massive zygomatic arches and teeth. (Russian Wikipedia, general species account)

Until recently it was treated as a subspecies of the grey long-eared bat, but molecular data show it is a species in its own right and more closely related to the brown long-eared bat. Its range includes arid landscapes in the west of Central Asia, in Ustyurt and Mangyshlak in southwest Kazakhstan and the Zaunguz Karakum and Kopet Dag in Turkmenistan. A second part of the range, probably isolated from the first, lies in arid areas in the west and south of Mongolia. (Russian Wikipedia, general species account)

Description: Wildlife of Mongolia guide, Wildlife of Everywhere (wildlifeofeverywhere.com); general species information paraphrased from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA)