The lesser naked-backed fruit bat is a fruit bat recorded on New Guinea and nearby islands. Its wing membranes are visible across the back; the treatment considers a Sulawesi record uncertain.
Its fur is uniformly dark brown. The flight membranes meet along the middle of the lower back, and fur remains beneath the exposed-looking part of the wing membrane.
In rainforest elevation surveys on Mount Wilhelm in Papua New Guinea, researchers caught one mature female Lesser Naked-backed Fruit Bat in a mist net set in a fallowed food garden at 711 metres. Previous records placed the species from sea level to 600 metres, so this capture was 111 metres above its known maximum.
The paper reports one higher-elevation record for this species: a single mature female at one site. Four surveys across two elevation gradients, conducted from 2014 to 2017, recorded 43 bat species; six were found above their previously known ranges. The authors interpreted the higher-elevation records as more likely reflecting incomplete past sampling than genuine range expansions.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.