The bat's peculiar looking nose assists in echolocation, or the sonar-like ability that bats - and some other animals - use to help them navigate, DiscoveryNews reports.

The animal, which is described in the February issue of the Journal of Mammology, was first seen in 2008 in a national park in Vietnam. But it wasn't until later, after catching some of the bats that a team of researchers found out it was actually a new species that had never before been documented.

In some ways, the Griffin's leaf-nosed bat is like Hipposideros armiger, or the great roundleaf bat. While Griffin's leaf-nosed bat is smaller, the two animals have similarly flattened noses and sometimes live in the same environment in Vietnam, according to the Journal of Mammology.

But unlike the great roundleaf bat, the Griffin's leaf-nosed bat is much calmer, Vu Dinh Thong, the lead author of the study, told National Geographic.

The new bat species is named after the late Donald Redfield Griffin, a professor at Rockefeller University in New York who studied echolocation.