Oct 30, 2013 12:09 PM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

Little is known about the flying fox bat, but that is because it is one of the world's least studied bats, something a recent study tried to change.

Native to the Mortlock Islands and other remote Pacific islands, the large breadfruit-eating bat has been practically ignored by the scientific community. All that exists on it is a specimen in a jar of alcohol at the Natural History Museum in London, according to a press release.

In a new study, published Tuesday in the journal ZooKeys, a team of bat biologists led by the College of Micronesia's Don Buden released a trove of new information on the relatively unknown creature.

"Very little is known about many of the mammals that live on remote Pacific islands, including this beautiful flying fox," study co-author Kristofer Helgen of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, said in the release. "This study gives us our first close look at a remarkable bat."

The specimen in London was collected from the Mortlock Islands in 1870 and named Pteropus phaeocephalus 12 years later by a British biologist named Oldfield Thomas. Buden found that a German naturalist had actually discovered and named the animal 50 years earlier.

"We found a report written by F.H. Kittlitz in 1836 describing his expedition to the Pacific Islands in the late 1820s. In that report he describes the flying-foxes of the Mortlocks and names them Pteropus pelagicus," Buden said. "This means the species was named long before Thomas's description in 1882."

Pre-established rules in the international scientific community state that whatever name pre-dates any following names given must be adopted, which the ZooKeys authors did.

The researchers examined skulls and skins of the bats from eight different museums on three different continents. With the added information on these bats, more can be done to protect their small populations.

"When we think of climate change having an impact on a mammal species, what comes to mind most immediately is an Arctic animal like the polar bear, which depends on sea ice to survive," Helgen said. "But this flying fox may be the best example of a mammal species likely to be negatively impacted by warming global climates. Here is a tropical mammal that has survived and evolved for hundreds of millennia on little atolls near the equator. How much longer will it survive as sea levels continue to rise?"

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