Scientists have identified a new genus of bat after discovering a rare specimen in South Sudan.
The badger-like striped bat was spotted in Bangangai Game Reserve by a Bucknell University biologist DeeAnn Reeder.
"My attention was immediately drawn to the bat's strikingly beautiful and distinct pattern of spots and stripes. It was clearly a very extraordinary animal, one that I had never seen before," said Reeder.
After returning to the US, Reeder determined the bat was the same as one originally captured in nearby Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1939 and named Glauconycteris superba, but she and colleagues did not believe that it fit with other bats in the genus Glauconycteris.
Genus is a low-level taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms.
"After careful analysis, it is clear that it doesn't belong in the genus that it's in right now," Reeder said.
"Its cranial characters, its wing characters, its size, the ears - literally everything you look at doesn't fit. It's so unique that we need to create a new genus," she said in a statement by Pensoft Publishers.
In the paper published by the journal ZooKeys, Reeder, along with co-authors from the Smithsonian Institution and the Islamic University in Uganda, placed this bat into a new genus - Niumbaha.
The word means "rare" or "unusual" in Zande, the language of the Azande people in Western Equatoria State, where the bat was captured.
The bat is just the fifth specimen of its kind ever collected, and the first in South Sudan.
