Wallace's Stripe-faced Fruit Bat

The Sulawesi stripe-faced fruit bat is a typical fruit bat with long, naked ears, forearms modified for flight and short hind legs with claws. There are white facial markings, each with a dark brown margin; a streak on the rostrum, a spot on the cheek, another at the angle of the jaw, a patch over the eye, a band across the upper lip and a patch on the chin. The only other known species of the genus Styloctenium, S. mindorensis, is differentiated by its multicusped lower and upper canine teeth.

The Sulawesi stripe-faced fruit bat is native to the island of Sulawesi in the Greater Sunda Islands and the Togian Islands in the Gulf of Tomini . It inhabits primary forest at altitudes of up to about 1,100 m (3,600 ft) but sometimes occurs in secondary forest where the understorey has been cleared to make way for cultivation of coffee or cocoa. When it is occasionally seen in more open areas, it is probably moving between fragmented patches of forest. Cave paintings of megabats, found near Kimberley in Australia, are unlike any bats living on that continent today; they more resemble the Sulawesi stripe-faced fruit bat than any other species. A fossilised wasp nest overlaying cave paintings of a similar type has been tested as being 17,500 years old, making the rock art older and maybe dating to the last ice age, some twenty to twenty-five thousand years ago.