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in England; I was therefore fortunate in being present when one was actually caught on a horse’s back. We were bivouacking late one evening near Coquimbo, in Chile, when my servant, noticing that one of the horses was very restive, went to see what was the matter, and, fancying he could detect something, suddenly put his hands on the beast’s whithers, and secured the vampire. *13
    (Charles R. Darwin)
    Because of similarities in appearance, behavior, and range (parts of Mexico, the warmer regions of South and Middle America, plus the islands of Trinidad and Margarita),
Desmodus, Diaemus,
and
Diphylla
were initially placed into their own family, the Desmodontidae. More recently, researchers have reduced them to a subfamily within the large, primarily Neotropical family Phyllostomidae. There are around one hundred and fifty phyllostomids (i.e., members of the family Phyllostomidae) and they’re sometimes referred to as New World leaf-nosed bats. This is because they live in the Americas and most of them have a vertically projecting, spear-shaped nasal structure. Although nose leaves may look menacing, they are actually soft and pliable.

    Early naturalists claimed that nose leaves were used by vampire bats as deadly flesh stilettos, to gouge victims before a blood meal. Many years later, scientists studying the strange ultrasonic capabilities of bats uncovered an interesting, though decidedly less gory function for the nasal protuberances. Just as a megaphone can be used to direct the human voice, the nose leaf is actually involved in directing the echolocation calls emitted by the bat. Ironically, nose leaves are greatly reduced in size in vampire bats (like
Desmodus
) where they function primarily in thermoperception—the ability to sense differences in temperature. This is an adaptation that comes in handy as vampire bats approach their warm-blooded prey in complete darkness. Once the bat gets within around fifteen centimeters of its target, thermoreceptors in the low, ridgelike nose leaf can detect the slight temperature differences that exist in areas of the skin where blood vessels lie just below the surface. The bat uses this information to help determine where a bite will be made. *14

    In hindsight, the function of the bat nose leaf was one more bit of misinterpreted information for early naturalists, who used the presence of this structure to mistakenly categorize over a hundred species of non-blood-feeding bats (e.g.,
Glossophaga
) as vampires. Along these lines, it should also be noted that nose leaves occur in two additional (and only distantly related) families of Old World bats, the Rhinolophidae and the Megadermatidae (the latter is now commonly known as false vampire bats). This is yet another example of convergent evolution, and although neither of these groups have any blood-feeding members, the presence of a nose leaf probably contributed to claims of vampire bats inhabiting Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Indo-Pacific. †15

    Even though the identity of the three vampire bats was not fully known until the 1890s, bloodletting bats have been referred to as vampires since the mid-1700s, and although vampire folklore did not begin with the discovery of vampire bats, it was clearly strengthened by it.
    According to folklorist Stu Burns, the word
vampire
has its somewhat hazy roots in the Slavic proper name
Upir,
first recorded in an eleventh-century Russian manuscript.
Vampire
(or
vampyre
—used hereafter to denote the mythical bloodsucker) is a westernization of
Upir
(or
Upyr
) and the word appears to have been coined in English in a pair of 1732 publications.
Vampyre
refers to a corpse that has returned from the dead to drink the blood of the living. Similar creatures were said to haunt the rural villages of nearly every Slavic nation. Not surprisingly, each culture gave their monster its own name (e.g.,
vukodlak
in Serbia,
strigoii
in Romania,
eretika
in Russia,
insurance