Smallest bat

What to remember

Nicknamed the bumblebee bat, Kitti's hog-nosed bat (Craseonycteris thonglongyai) lives in Thailand and Myanmar. Its body measures 29 to 33 millimetres long and it weighs about 2 grams; the record sheet gives 3.1 cm.

It holds two titles: the smallest bat, and the smallest mammal when body length is compared. The yardstick matters, since the size of a living thing can be measured many ways, by mass, volume, length or even genome.

The nickname alone conveys the scale. Knowledge of life is incomplete, though, and the smallest organism may not have been discovered yet.