Eleven bats remain in the National Zoo’s colony. The initial challenge the team faced was how to feed the animals. Virginia big-eared bats, which are a subspecies of the Townsend’s big-eared bat (Corynorhinuss townsendii), eat while flying. [...more]
The National Zoo has been awarded a grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to establish a captive population of the Virginia big-eared bat at the National Zoo’s Conservation & Research Center near Front Royal, Va. Only 15,000 Virginia big-eared bats remain living in caves in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina, and these are threatened by the white-nose syndrome. [...more]
This fossil represents a new genus and species of extinct aneuretopsychid, Jeholopsyche liaoningensis, recently described in a paper in the journal ZooKeys by Conrad Labandeira of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and Dong Ren and ChungKun Shih of the College of Life Sciences, Capital Normal University, Beijing. The aneuretopsychidae are a family of long-proboscid insects that lived in Asia from the Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous. The paper documents the first formal record of fossil Aneuretopsychidae in China. The new fossils reveal previously unknown and detailed structure of the mouthparts, antennae, head, thorax, legs and abdomen of this distinctive insect lineage.
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