La Touche's free-tailed bat

La Touche's free-tailed bat (Tadarida latouchei) is a free-tailed bat of the family Molossidae, named after the Irish naturalist John David Digues La Touche. It has a patchy range that includes northern China (Liaoning, Inner Mongolia, Hebei, Beijing and Shandong), northern and central Laos and northeastern Thailand, with a few vagrant records from islands of Japan. It was once treated as a subspecies of Tadarida teniotis and is now recognised as a species of its own, although the group still needs further revision. Adults have a head and body length of about 67 to 72 millimetres and a forearm of 53 to 57 millimetres; the fur is short, soft and velvety, dark brown or greyish brown above and paler below, the upper lip is wrinkled, and the large ears are joined by a narrow flap of skin over the forehead. The species roosts in caves, has been recorded in dry evergreen hill forest at 1,500 metres in Thailand, and has formed a large colony in Laos. The IUCN lists it as Data Deficient, and it is thought to be at risk from hunting for food and from disturbance of its roosts.