Goloskin: Bald body and terrible stench. This rare bat has learned to accelerate to 100 km/h (7 photos)

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Regarding the bare-skinned bulldog bat, this is an absolute truth, because many will give it the palm of ugliness, and some will find something charming in it. But regardless of your tastes, its disgusting and almost poisonous smell will not leave anyone indifferent.





The jokes about his specific appearance are too obvious. Therefore, I will tell you the reason why the mouse exchanged relative beauty for obvious ugliness. In nature, everything is thought out to the smallest detail, and, as you begin to guess, its specific charm has a practical meaning.



The fact is that hair is, of course, a beautiful thing, but impractical in flight: hairs increase air resistance and ultimately reduce flight speed. The evolution of the holoskin went towards better aerodynamics, as a result of which this flying wrinkle lost its thick hair (it still has small hairs).





Thanks to its nakedness and the longest wings among its relatives, the holoskin gained the ability to accelerate in flight to 100 km/h. He is one of the fastest bats in principle! This is despite the fact that the mouse itself is quite large - it is 25 cm long and weighs 200 grams.



In addition to wrinkles, the bat has giant teeth in common with the bulldog. The stink bug does not eat meat in the usual sense; it prefers pure protein in the form of small flying arthropods. He finds it using classic chiropteran echolocation. The fangs are designed to break the thick armor of local beetles.



But the lack of normal fur also has obvious disadvantages. The most important of them is the vulnerability of the skin and membranes on the wings when walking. To solve the last problem, the mouse came up with the idea of ​​folding and tucking its huge wings into special bags. The folded wings do not interfere with climbing, and the bald charmer moves very deftly on all fours, clinging to the surface with sharp claws.



And so that the skin remains as elastic and beautiful, the holoskin lubricates it with a kind of cream that is produced in the throat sac. People who miraculously caught the animal and opened this bag received a knockout blow with the smell of burnt skin or two-week-old unwashed socks soaked in motor oil - yes, this is exactly how sophisticated connoisseurs of animal perfumery describe the amber of a bat.



The bald mouse has taken a liking to the largest archipelago in the world - the Malayan archipelago. But it is quite rare due to the fact that the population of bare-skinned bats is very spread out across the islands. But if suddenly you are wildly unlucky and happen to wander into a den where thousands of these lovely creatures can live without bothering you, you may simply pass out from the stench. Or from charm.