| The current Biodiversity Crisis has made the cataloging and understanding of the planet's biological diversity an urgent matter. Living groups with poorly-understood diversity may become extinct before their potential contribution to understanding the organizing principles of life, or their direct benefits to humanity, may be realized. By attempting to deepen our knowledge on even comparatively small sections of the world's biota, systematists counter the loss of biodiversity. Here, I present a systematic study of Natalidae, a little-known bat family that provides a clear example of underestimated biological diversity. The family was traditionally assumed to comprise a small assemblage of uniform species, and therefore interesting patterns of morphological diversification and biogeography contained in the family had been overlooked. In this work, I revise the recognized diversity of Natalidae by compiling recent changes in the taxonomy of the family and by redefining its distributional and species limits. In addition, I provide hypotheses of the phylogeny of the family that lay the groundwork for comparative analyses of the functional morphology, reproductive biology, and biogeographic history of these bats. As a result, Natalidae is shown here to be much more diverse in terms of number of species and morphological adaptations than what was previously supposed. Moreover, the unique biogeographic history of the family interpreted from estimations of its phylogeny provides a potentially crucial datum for understanding the process of faunal formation among Neotropical bats. |
