New cave bat species in Sri Lanka highlights need for more research

Colombo: During the 18th and 19th centuries when Sri Lanka was a British colony, many British naturalists studied the island’s rich biodiversity and contributed to profiling the same. Tea planter W.W.A. Phillips was one of them, a man who was particularly interested in mammals, and eventually published the “Manual of the Mammals of Sri Lanka” in 1932. A chapter in his book describes the island’s bat fauna, including the Sri Lankan woolly bat (Kerivoula malpasi), a species then new to science.