A new abnormality record in bats: a teratological condition or skull trauma due to tooth avulsion in Noctilio leporinus?

(Uploaded by Plazi for the Bat Literature Project) Here we report on a skull of an adult male Noctilio leporinus caught in the Guiana Shield, South America. The animal was lacking the upper left molar-row and exhibited skeletal deformations in the rostral and palatal regions. This aberration could have been the result of a traumatic avulsion of the left C1. As a consequence of its position and depth of the root, the C1 avulsion could have broken much of the surrounding alveolar process during the initial injury, with subsequent loss of the remaining teeth via periodontal inflammation and tooth decay.