Brachyphylla cavernarum
The Antillean fruit-eating bat is one of two leaf-nosed bat species belonging to the genus Brachyphylla. The species occurs in the Caribbean from Puerto Rico to St. Vincent and Barbados. Fossil specimens have also been recorded from New Providence, Bahamas.

Dobson, George Edward (1848-1895) · Public Domain · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Also called
- Antillean fruit-eating batPBDB
- Sits inside
- BrachyphyllaPBDB
- Diet
- omnivorePBDB, for Phyllostomidae
- Life habit
- volantPBDB, for Chiroptera
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Chiroptera
Time the record covers
At most 129 thousand years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 129 ka and 0 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
5 occurrences of Brachyphylla cavernarum on record, most of them in the Pleistocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
5 occurrences- Pleistocene73%
- Holocene27%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Brachyphylla cavernarum and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Brachyphylla cavernarum and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
74 taxa- Nesophontes edithae4 sites
- Phyllonycteris major4 sites
- Eptesicus fuscus wetmorei3 sites
- Artibeus jamaicensis jamaicensis2 sites
- Columbina passerina2 sites
- Margarops fuscatus2 sites
- Monophyllus plethodon frater2 sites
- Monophyllus redmani portoricensis2 sites
- Pteronotus parnellii portoricensis2 sites
- Tadarida brasiliensis antillularum2 sites
- Tyrannus dominicensis2 sites
- Accipiter striatus1 site
- Agelaius xanthomus1 site
- Alsophis1 site
- Ameiva griswoldi1 site
- Anolis bimaculatus leachi1 site
- Antrostomus noctitherus1 site
- Athene cunicularia1 site
- Aves1 site
- Boidae1 site
- Calidris1 site
- Capella anthonyi1 site
- Cardisoma guanhumi1 site
- Cinclocerthia ruficauda1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 5 sites for Brachyphylla cavernarum, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
2 references- Sub-recent Insectivora and Chiroptera from Puerto Rico, with the description of a new bat of the genus Stenoderma4
- Fossil vertebrates from Antigua, Lesser Antilles: evidence for late Holocene human-caused extinctions in the West Indies1
Each of the 5 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Each entry links to doi.org. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content2
Picture of Brachyphylla cavernarum
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Dobson, George Edward (1848-1895)
- Licence
- Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
CT scan
- Source
- MorphoSource
- Credit
- AMNH Mammal Collections
- Licence
- not stated by the source
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
- Specimen
- Brachyphylla cavernarum · AMNH:Mammals:M-213905
Smithsonian Open Access was not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itBrachyphylla through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Gray 1834