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Several years in the making, this book is co-published by Wits University Press and the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI). It is a full-colour book including colour plates of bats, skull photographs, and spectrograms of bat echolocation calls. Full-colour distribution maps comprise the core of the book, and these accurate point maps (with modeled potential ranges overlaid) illustrate the distribution of 102 species of bats throughout south-central Africa. Previous works provided only shaded range maps. The maps included here are based on some 5500 species-locality records based on museum specimens (from 15 museum collections around the world), of which most were personally identified by one of the authors.

Significantly, the book includes several synthetic chapters on the evolution, biogeography, ecology and echolocation of bats. Species accounts provide information on a wide range of biological topics and include colour photographs of bats (82 species), skull and dental photographs (85 species) and accurate time-expanded echolocation call spectrograms (56 species). Identification is aided by detailed character matrices (an acknowledged improvement on dichotomous keys), which are useful for identification in the field as well as from museum voucher specimens.