Volume 35, Plate II / Mammalia (Mammals)

White Box-Tailed & Common Vampyre Bat

Diclidurus albus, or Freyreysii & Vampyrus spectrum

1. White Box-Tailed Bat. This bat is remarkable for a tail whose coccygeal bones run out into two horny pieces covered by skin, forming a kind of two valved box laid horizontally and capable of separate motion, a structure unexampled elsewhere. It was discovered upon cocoa trees near Rio Pardo, in Brazil.
2. Common Vampyre Bat. About the size of a magpie, this Brazilian bat is reddish brown above and more yellowish beneath, with one specimen measuring thirty two inches across the wings. A notorious blood sucker and destroyer of fruit, though feeding chiefly on insects, it haunts deep woods and ruined plantations through Brazil, Guiana, and perhaps the north coast of South America, but not beyond the isthmus of Darien.