Found: New Beetle Collected by Darwin 180 Years Ago
Entomologist stumbles across Darwinilus sedarisi in London museum specimens.
Call it a 205th birthday present: A beetle collected by Charles Darwin was declared a new species on the anniversary of his birth, February 12, 1809, a new study says.
The beetle, dubbed Darwinilus sedarisi, after the naturalist and the author David Sedaris, is also a new genus of rove beetle—a group of highly diverse insects.
"There is a famous Darwin quote about beetles," said Stylianos Chatzimanolis, an entomologist at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, who led the study of the new beetle and came up with its name. Darwin "said that 'Whenever I hear of the capture of rare beetles, I feel like an old war-horse at the sound of a trumpet.' I think