This family of nine genera is distributed across northern Africa, southern Asia and westwards to the Philippines, the Solomon Islands, Australia and PNG. The hipposiderid fauna of the Australian and PNG region is rich and diverse including two endemic genera: Anthops (found only on the Solomon Islands), and Rhinonicteris (found only in northern Australia).
The hipposiderid fauna of the Australian mainland has declined sharply since the Miocene (c. 45 Ma BP) with growing aridity associated with the Australian part of the Indo-Australian tectonic plate's drift north.
A limitation when making models for this family has been the small number of occurrence records for several species and the biases apprent in the spatial distribution of occurrence locations. Records frequently cease at the Indonesia-PNG border with no (or very few) records on the Indonesian side. (See, for example, Hippossideros cervinus.) This may be overcome to some extent by manually entering records not yet supplied by GBIF (e.g. from the British Museum of Natural History) but this is long-term proposition and, for the interim, cautious interpretation of the models for many hipposiderid species will be required.