Thomas's fruit-eating bat
species of mammal
Thomas's fruit-eating bat (Dermanura watsoni), sometimes also popularly called Watson's fruit-eating bat, is a species of bat in the family Phyllostomidae. It is found from southern Mexico, through Central America to Colombia. Its South American range is to the west of the Andes. The species name is in honor of H. J. Watson, a plantation owner in western Panama who used to send specimens to the British Natural History Museum, where Oldfield Thomas would often describe them.
Taxonomy
This species was formerly placed in the genus Artibeus, but was reclassified, based on mitochondrial cytochrome b gene sequence data, in 2004. Dermanura, formerly a subgenus of Artibeus, was elevated to a separate genus. The two genera cannot be differentiated by morphology.
Population on Isla Escudo de Veraguas
The population on the small (3.4 km2) island Isla Escudo de Veraguas off the Caribbean coast of Panama was classified as a separate species within the genus (D. incomitata, the solitary fruit-eating bat) in 1994. It had been evaluated as critically endangered by the IUCN, being threatened by habitat loss in addition to the tiny size of its range, as well as a species in danger of imminent extinction by the Alliance for Zero Extinction. It was transferred to D. watsoni in 2009, based on cytochrome b data that showed it nested within watsoni.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q28154683. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2004, 1994 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas's fruit-eating bat” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.