Explore "A New Name for the Mexican Red Bat" by Eugene Raymond Hall on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
When Gerrit S. Miller, Jr., published his "Revision of the North American Bats of the Family Vespertilionidae" (N. Amer. Fauna, 13:1-140, 3 pls., 39 figs. in text, October 16, 1897), the red bat, _Lasiurus borealis_, was known from the southern half of Mexico but he did not know that the hoary bat, _Lasiurus cinereus_, also occurred there. Therefore, the name _A[talapha]. mexicana_ Saussure (Revue et magasin de zoologie, 13 (ser. 2): 97, March, 1861) that clearly pertained to a lasiurine bat, almost certainly from southern Mexico, was applied by Miller (_op. cit._: 111) to the red bat as a subspecific name. Subsequently, the hoary bat, _Lasiurus cinereus cinereus_ (Beauvois 1796), was shown to occur in southern Mexico. For example, an adult male _L. c. cinereus_ was obtained on May 6, 1945, by W. H. Burt from the Barranca Seca in the State of Michoacán (see Hall and Villa, Univ. Kansas Publ., Mus.
Nat. Hist., 1:445, December 27, 1949). Because two, instead of only one, species of _Lasiurus_ are now known to occur in the general part of Mexico visited by Saussure, it has seemed desirable to re-examine the application of the name _A[talapha]. mexicana_ Saussure which that naturalist proposed along with a description as follows: