Lesser yellow-shouldered bat

The lesser yellow-shouldered bat (Sturnira nana) is a small leaf-nosed bat of the family Phyllostomidae, native to Peru and Ecuador. It was described in 1971 from a specimen collected in 1970 in the Ayacucho Region of Peru, and it was not found outside Peru until nine individuals were captured in southern Ecuador in April 2009. It is the smallest member of its genus, with a forearm of about 34 to 36 millimetres, dark grayish-brown back fur with four-banded hairs, and no shoulder glands. Its lineage branched off early within Sturnira, in the Late Miocene. It lives at roughly 1,430 to 1,670 metres along the eastern edge of the Andes, in lower montane forest and at clearing edges. The IUCN lists it as endangered, since it is known from only two sites and its range is severely fragmented, and Bat Conservation International put it on its worldwide priority list in 2013.