The spotted bat was first described by zoologist Joel Asaph Allen from the American Museum of Natural History in 1891.

The weight is about 15 g. It has three distinctive white spots on its black back.

[2] The spotted bat's mating season is in autumn and the females produce their offspring (usually one juvenile) in June or July.

The habitats of the spotted bat are undisturbed roosts on cliffs along the Grand Canyon in Arizona, and open and dense deciduous and coniferous forests, hay fields, deserts, marshes, riparian areas, and dry shrub-steppe grasslands in Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, and British Columbia, Canada.

Use of pesticides such as DDT and other insecticides in the 1960s led to a severe decline in the spotted bat population, but current observations had shown that it is more common than formerly believed.