Short communication, Note
https://doi.org/10.20302/NC.2016.25.14
The findings of Mehely’s horseshoe bat (Chiroptera) in Croatia in the last century were mistakes in identification
Nikola Tvrtković
; Natura – Društvo za zaštitu prirode Hrvatske
Abstract
Personal notes discovered in the papers of Croatian mammalogist Professor Beatrica Đulić were used to assess the reliability of the identification of the findings of Rhinolophus mehelyi Matschie, 1900, in Croatia from 1952 to 1968. Because no voucher specimens exist, analysis of the original description of caught specimens, measurements from Đulić’s field notebook, together with published data (Đulić, 1959, 1961), were compared with recent data on two morphologically similar species from the same genus. It is established that there is no evidence to confirm the finding of R. mehelyi in Croatia: in all cases, dubious specimens belonged, with a high degree of certainty, to another species, R. euryale. The reason for the wrong determination was insufficient knowledge of the variability of the two morphologically similar species in the years when the findings were published.
Keywords
Rhinolophus mehely; Croatia; finding validation
Hrčak ID:
160565
URI
Publication date:
30.6.2016.
Visits: 1.716 *