Nalazi Meheljevog potkovnjaka (Chiroptera) u Hrvatskoj u prošlom stoljeću su bile pogreške u identifikaciji
Authors: Nikola Tvrtković
Authors and affiliation
Abstract
Personal notes discovered in the papers of Croatian mammalogist Professor Beatrica Đulić were used to assess the reliability of the identification of the findings of Rhinolophus mehelyi Matschie, 1900, in Croatia from 1952 to 1968. Because no voucher specimens exist, analysis of the original description of caught specimens, measurements from Đulić’s field notebook, together with published data (Đulić, 1959, 1961), were compared with recent data on two morphologically similar species from the same genus. It is established that there is no evidence to confirm the finding of R. mehelyi in Croatia: in all cases, dubious specimens belonged, with a high degree of certainty, to another species, R. euryale. The reason for the wrong determination was insufficient knowledge of the variability of the two morphologically similar species in the years when the findings were published.
Keywords
Rhinolophus mehely, Croatia, finding validation