Clave de campo para los murciélagos de Costa Rica

Abstract

Costa Rica has an extremely diverse bat fauna with 109 species recorded from the country to date. The diversity of bats at a given locality can be high with 71 species known from the La Selva Biological Station in the Caribbean lowlands. Timm and LaVal's (1998) "A field key to the bats of Costa Rica" provides an illustrated key to the species found, as well as four species believed to occur but not yet reported from the country. It also contains a brief review of recent taxonomic changes involving species found within Costa Rica. Herein, we provide a spanish translation of this key, which is updated and includes new illustrations of characters useful for the identification of selected species. Additionally, we include tables summarizing bat distributions by region of the country and by elevation for all species known or believed to occur in Costa Rica. Future fieldwork should result in the addition of more species to the country's faunal list.