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Dubbed the ‘Yoda Bat’, this tube-nosed fruit bat is just one of the roughly 200 species encountered during two scientific expeditions to Papua New Guinea.

Though seen on previous expeditions, the bat has yet to be formally documented as a new species, or even named. Like other fruit bats, though, it disperses seeds from the fruit in its diet, perhaps making the flying mammal crucial to its tropical rain forest ecosystem.

A team of scientists from Conservation International, partnered with A Rocha International and Papua New Guinea’s Institute for Biological Research, has revealed more than 200 new species of life that they discovered in a remote region of Papua New Guinea. The findings include new mammals, frogs, insects and plants — and more than 100 arachnids. (Some of the species are so distinct that are also belong to new genuses.) Most photogenic of the discovered animals is a tube-nosed fruit bat that bears a startling resemblance to the Jedi Master Yoda of the Star Wars films.

 

Whether LucasFilm plans to sue the bat for copyright infringement is unknown.

[Cheers nationalgeographic.com]