This fruit-eating bat lives on New Britain. Its genus is marked by wings that begin along the spine, making the back look bare; tracked bats visited forests and cultivated fruit trees.
In Dobsonia, the wings originate along the spine, creating the appearance of a bare back.
New Britain Naked-backed Fruit Bats are endemic to New Britain, Papua New Guinea. In the Whiteman Range, researchers caught one sub-adult female in a mist net at 941 metres. Previous records ranged from sea level to 300 metres, placing the capture 641 metres above the known maximum. The transect covered four sites from 500 to 1,100 metres, spaced 200 metres apart. Table 1 records one female of this species, with a mass of 158 g.
The authors describe both Dobsonia praedatrix and D. minor as mainly lowland bats that could move into lower montane forest, where floristic diversity and structure are similar. For the six elevated records, they considered incomplete past sampling more likely than genuine range expansion.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.