Furipterus horrens, the thumbless bat, is misnamed – it clearly has a thumb, although the digit is reduced and is largely enclosed in the edge of the wing membrane. These tiny bats live in the Neotropics from Costa Rica south to Brazil. They fly like large moths through the forest understory, and roost in hollows in fallen trees and in small caves. Furipterus horrens is one of only two species in the Furipteridae.

This specimen was made available to The University of Texas High-Resolution X-ray CT Facility for scanning by Dr. Nancy Simmons of the American Museum of Natural History. Funding for scanning was provided by a National Science Foundation grant (DEB-9873663) to Dr. Simmons, and funding for scanning and image processing was provided by an NSF Digital Libraries Initiative grant to Dr. Timothy Rowe of The University of Texas at Austin.

Dorsal view of the scanned specimen.


Lateral view of the scanned specimen.

This specimen was scanned by Matthew Colbert on 10 march 2003 along the coronal axis for a total of 187 slices, each slice 0.0134 mm thick with an interslice spacing of 0.0125 mm.

Links

Furipterus horrens on the Animal Diversity Web (University of Michigan Museum of Zoology)

Bat Conservation International

None available.