 The Kitti's hog-nosed bat, "Craseonycteris thonglongyai", the smallest species of bat and the smallest mammal in the world, was found by him in 1973.He died suddenly from a massive heart attack, so the formal description was written by his British colleague, John E. Hill, who named the species in honour of its discoverer.He went on to discover other new bat species, such as the extremely rare Salim Ali's fruit bat, "Latidens salimalii", which had been misidentified in an Indian collection.