Reinstatement of Barbastella (Chiroptera, Vespertilionidae) and Eothenomys (Rodentia, Cricetidae) to the Lao fauna

Barbastelles Barbastella Gray, 1821 occur widely in temperate and subtropical Asia including the Himalayas, west and north China, Taiwan, Japan (Simmons 2005, Zhang et al. 2007) and south China near the border of Southeast Asia (Francis 2008). Authoritative reviews of bats of Southeast Asia typically refer to the genus in the region only through a nebulous, possible occurrence in Vietnam or ‘Indochina’ (Corbet and Hill 1992, Simmons 2005, Francis 2008). However, Vietnamese sources typically do not include the genus at all (Dang Huy Huynh 1994, Borissenko and Kruskop 2003) and it is listed in no modern work for Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR; Laos), such as Duckworth et al. (1999). The taxonomy of Asian barbastelles is clearly more complex than the practice of most recent reviews in considering all populations of Asia conspecific with Barbastella leucomelas (Cretzschmar, 1830), of type locality Sinai (date clarified in Benda and Mlikovský 2008, locality in Benda et al. 2008) (Corbet and Hill 1992, Simmons 2005, Francis 2008). Himalayan barbastelles evidently warrant separation as Barbastella darjelingensis (Hodgson, 1855) (Zhang et al. 2007, Benda et al. 2008), but further species-level taxa could well be present in, for example, Japan, and Barbastella beijingensis was recently named from Beijing (Zhang et al. 2007). There remains no analysis of barbastelles using both morphological and nuclear characters on individuals from many Asian localities.