Sunday 26 January 2014

Natural History Museum, London, Yields Remarkable New Beetle Specimens from Brazil

Jan. 23, 2014 — A visit to the Natural History Museum, London, yielded an unexpected surprise for Dr. Joseph Parker, a UK biologist based in New York at Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History.

Among the 22,000 drawers of specimens that comprise the Coleoptera (beetle) collection housed in the Department of Entomology, was a new rove beetle genus collected during the 1990s in Manaus, a region of the Brazilian Amazon. The new genus is described in the open access journa lZooKeys.

The beetles, which measure only 3 mm in length, have a remarkable sexual dimorphism: the male has large eyes with over one hundred eye facets, whereas the female eyes have a paltry 12 facets. The male also has large flight wings, while the female has no wings at all. It's likely that the male does most of the searching for mates, while the female doesn't develop large eyes or wings and invests instead in egg production.

No comments:

Post a Comment

You only need to enter your comment once! Comments will appear once they have been moderated. This is so as to stop the would-be comedian who has been spamming the comments here with inane and often offensive remarks. You know who you are!

Related Posts with Thumbnails

ShareThis