The Okinawa flying fox (''Pteropus loochoensis'') is a species of megabat in the genus '' Pteropus''. It is endemic to possibly

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

. It was previously listed as

extinct Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...

by the

IUCN The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN; officially International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources) is an international organization working in the field of nature conservation and sustainable use of natu ...

, but because the two known specimens are taxonomically uncertain and of unknown provenance, it was changed to 'Data Deficient'. Some place this animal into synonymy under ''

Pteropus mariannus The Mariana fruit bat (''Pteropus mariannus''), also known as the Mariana flying fox, and the ''fanihi'' in Chamorro, is a megabat found only in the Mariana Islands and Ulithi (an atoll in the Caroline Islands). Habitat loss has driven it to en ...

''.Koopman, K.F. 1993. Order Chiroptera. In: D.E. Wilson and D.M. Reeder (eds) ''Mammal species of the World, a Taxonomic and Geographic Reference''. 2nd edition. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C.MacPhee, R.D.E. and Flemming, C. 1999. Requiem Æternam. The last five hundred years of mammalian species extinctions. In: R.D.E. MacPhee (ed.) Extinctions in Near Time, pp.333-371. Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, New York. Two specimens are in the British Natural History Museum, and the whereabouts of the third is unknown. Two of the specimens are believed to have come from Southeast Asia, so the true distribution of the Okinawa flying fox is unknown.Simmons, N.B. 2005. Order Chiroptera. In: D.E. Wilson and D.M. Reeder (eds) Mammal Species of the World: a Taxonomic and Geographic Reference. Third edition, vol 1, pp. 312-529. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

References

Pteropus Bats of Asia Endemic mammals of Japan Okinawa Islands Endemic fauna of the Ryukyu Islands Mammals described in 1870 Taxonomy articles created by Polbot Taxa named by John Edward Gray {{Fruit-bat-stub