Bats in Dresden

The Staatliche Naturhistorische Sammlungen Dresden (Museum fur Tierkunde, abteilung mammalogie) Germany, has a nice collection of bats from Indonesia, dating back to the end of the 19th century, collected by the legendary Adolf B. Meyer. To revive a long running project of Erwin Kompanje and myself (to describe and identify a small collection of fruitbats from Talaud, kept at the Natural History Museum Rotterdam) the two of us drove to Dresden and studied the (stuffed) fruit bats from that archipelago north of Sulawesi, Indonesia. Zoological material from that area is rare, but we found what we were looking for: the earliest collected specimen of Pteropus pumilus Miller 1910.