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Rhinolophus ferrumequinum, Greater Horseshoe Bat
Dr. Nancy Simmons - American Museum of Natural History
Rhinolophus ferrumequinum
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skull
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American Museum of Natural History (AMNH 245591)

Image processing: Dr. Jessie Maisano
Publication Date: 22 Jan 2003

Views: whole specimen | head only

ITIS TNS Google MSN

Rhinolophus ferrumequinum, the greater horseshoe bat, has one of the largest geographic distributions of any bat, ranging from Europe and northern Africa in the east to China, Korea, and Japan in the west. This subspecies, R. f. nippon, is from Japan. Like other members of the genus Rhinolophus, these bats specialize in hunting insects in complex habitats (in and near vegetation). They have an unusual, highly specialized echolocation system that takes advantage of the Doppler shift to separate emitted pulses (calls) and returning echoes in frequency rather than in time. These bats simultaneously emit long, constant frequency calls and listen to returning echoes, and analyze the resulting auditory data to build a complex, dynamic auditory map of their environment. An anatomical feature associated with use of Doppler shift echolocation is an extremely large cochlea, in which the basal turn is tuned to be especially sensitive to the frequency of returning echoes, which are lower frequency than the calls emitted by the bat.

About the Species

This whole preserved specimen was collected from Hopeh, Beijing, China on July 30, 1958. It is now part of the American Museum of Natural History Mammalogy Collections (AMNH 245591). The specimen was made available 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 a National Science Foundation Digital Libraries Initiative grant to Dr. Timothy Rowe of the Department of Geological Sciences, The University of Texas at Austin.

About this Specimen

The entire specimen was scanned by Matthew Colbert on 13 December 2001 along the coronal axis for a total of 741 slices, each slice 0.097 mm thick, with an interslice spacing of 0.097 mm. The head was digitally isolated from the full body scan.

About the
Scan
Links

Horseshoe bats on Walker's Mammals of the World Online

Recording of Rhinolophus ferrumequinum from the Università degli Studi di Pavia

Bat Conservation International

Literature
& Links

None available.

Additional
Imagery

To cite this page: Dr. Nancy Simmons, 2003, "Rhinolophus ferrumequinum" (On-line), Digital Morphology. Accessed March 19, 2024 at http://digimorph.org/specimens/Rhinolophus_ferrumequinum/head/.

©2002-20019 - UTCT/DigiMorph Funding by NSF
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