Van Gelder's bat

Van Gelder's bat, also called Van Gelder's big-eared bat and known to science as Bauerus dubiaquercus, is a small vesper bat of Central America. It belongs to the family Vespertilionidae and is the only species in its genus, which places it in the tribe Antrozoini of the subfamily Vespertilioninae, where its closest named relative is the pallid bat of North America. The bat lives in forest from sea level up to about 2,300 metres, although it is seldom found above about 1,300 metres. It hunts insects and is active around dusk and dawn. Its range is fragmented across Belize, Costa Rica, Honduras and Mexico, and deforestation is listed as a threat to it. The bat was discovered by Richard Van Gelder, then a curator of mammalogy at the American Museum of Natural History, who named it dubiaquercus in honour of its collectors, Richard Zweifel and Oakes Plimpton: dubia means doubt in Latin, as zweifel does in German, and quercus is Latin for oak. In 2018 the IUCN evaluated it as near threatened.