It looks like not all Xanthopygina are brightly colored after all

A new paper just came out where Adam Brunke and I describe a new genus and three new species of Xanthopygina rove beetles. What makes this genus different from any other Xanthopygina that I have recently described is they are dull brown, with short elytra and no hind wings (aptery). You can read the whole paper here (open access)

Here is a little bit of background on this paper: many years ago I received a bunch of weird looking rove beetles from Zack Falin at the University of Kansas. Zack is a friend and long term collaborator/enabler of my rove beetle studies. Zack had identified these beetles as Xanthopygina but when I first looked at them, I thought "No way" and left them in a drawer. 

Part of the reason why I am writing this blog post is because sometimes we, taxonomists, tend to ignore some specimens and not wanting really to acknowledge their existence.

I sort of repeated this exercise (look at the beetles, say no way) every year for a a number of years until last year. I am working on the revision of Xanthopygus, a multi-year project and I was looking for another project that I could finish relatively quickly so I can publish a revision before the Xanthopygus one. As I was browsing through the Xanthopygina specimens in my office, I noticed these little beetles again and I started looking at them under the microscope. I hated to admit it but Zack was right, these specimens were Xanthopygina. It also appeared that they did not belong in any of the existing genera currently in Xanthopygina. Last year, Adam and I finished a paper where we produced a phylogenetic tree of all known genera ofd Xanthopygina. So we reran the analyses with a few more morphological characters (there are no molecular data for Ikaros) and you can see the results below. We can definitely say that they do not belong in some lineages but until we get molecular data we wont's be able to say exactly where they belong.

I am particular proud of the etymology for this new genus. As I mentined in the paper: "The word Ikaros is an alternate spelling of the word Icarus, the son of Daedalus who (in the Greek mythology) constructed the Labyrinth. Icarus and Daedalus escaped the Labyrinth by flying with wings made of feathers and glued by wax. However, Icarus flew too close to the sun and the wax melted. The name is rather appropriate for this genus considering these are species found in high altitudes that have lost their wings."    

Herman's Catalogue of Staphylinidae

I received my copy of Lee Herman's catalogue in early 2002, while still a graduate student at the University of Kansas. I was actually too shy to write Lee and ask for a copy so Michael Engel did it for me. I remember thinking that there was no reason Lee would send me - a still unknown entity with just one publication -  a copy, but of course I was wrong.

I think it has been by far the most influential publication in my career. Yes, nothing is perfect, and like any paper it has some errors and omission (Aleocharinae, Paederinae...) but I would have been so lost without this, especially early in my life as a graduate student. I still open the volume that contains the Xanthopygina (the one specially bound in the picture) at least once every week. I think it is fair to say that my productivity would have been significantly impacted (in a negative way) if Lee has not published this work.

The amount of work required to produce something as massive as this is almost beyond comprehension and this is why other catalogues spend so much time in the [unpublished database] stage.

Then again...

I think I am fairly good in self motivating myself to push through projects to completion. Instead of describing two new genera in a simple Zootaxa-style paper, how about we produce a phylogenetic analysis of Xanthiopygina and add all known genera, including these two new taxa? Sure, it will take a year more or so, but it will keep the engine running.

The thrill is gone

One of the biggest challenges for me is to push through a work to publication, when I have figured everything out. Last week I was on Twitter telling the world about how awesome it feels when you finally figure out something -- a unique characteristic that unites a group a three undescribed taxa into a genus.

That glorious moment when you finally find a unique characteristic for a group of species that you thought belong to a new genus #taxonomy

— Stelio Chatzimanolis (@schatzimanolis) October 18, 2017

But then the thrill is gone. I have figured out that this is a new genus. I know that there are three new species. Now I have to show this to the rest of the world. But by this point there is nothing (or almost nothing) new to be discovered. I just have to spend endless hours taking photos, drawing and writing descriptions to persuade my peer community that these are indeed new taxa. But there is very little personal satisfaction in the process and this can slow down the process a bit.

Two new genera and at least five new species. 

When I was starting out as a graduate student, I was trying to maximize the number of papers I could get and sometimes published papers as"least publishable unit". Now I think I am at the opposite spectrum. Last week I submitted a paper where I was reviewing two genera (Dysanellus and Torobus). And for my next paper I seriously consider putting together a description of two NEW genera together. 

Figuring things out

Recently I published an new paper describing the genus Phanolinopsis and describing four new species. While writing a paper like that is pretty straight forward once you have figured things out, it usually takes a lot of time to figure things out.

Many many years ago I was visiting a natural history museum examining their collection of Xanthopygina beetles. Among the materials was a specimen of Phanolinopsis erythros.

Phanolinopsis erythros Chatzimanolis

I was puzzled. At that time, I was working on the revision of Nordus and Philothalpus and had finished the revision of Elmas. Let just say that my understanding of Xanthopygina was limited. I asked a Very Important Rove beetle systematist at the museum there what they thought of the specimen and they looked at it and said: "Yes, I have examined it, I could not figure it out, I doubt you will".

Well, they were right in a sense, it took me 11 years to figure it out. I guess what I am trying to say is that figuring out things in taxonomy sometimes takes a very long time. So while writing a taxonomic paper is 'easy', deciding what goes in that paper may take a lifetime. I have been lucky to be able to work with Xanthopygina for ~17 years now, so I had the time to "figure things out". But I am afraid, the way we do science nowadays does not usually allow for having that much time of working uninterrupted* on a project or taxonomic group.

On an unrelated note, on the same paper I named a new species after my daughter.

Phanolinopsis norahae Chatzimanolis

* Over the years,  I have worked on other things other than Xanthopygina, from phylogeography to fossils, but I have never stopped looking at these beetles. 

The end of Staphylinidae sensu stricto?

I recently submitted a book chapter on fossil rove beetles where I had the following footnote:

" One could argue that we have overextended the meaning of “Staphylinidae” since the family is not very well defined and the subfamilies themselves can probably be elevated to the family status."

The editors kindly asked me to remove it from the book chapter because they did not want to open Pandora's box (their expression, not mine).

So instead, I am just going to put it here, on this blog.

Over the last several years more and more ex-families (eg Scydmaeninae) are getting sucked into Staphylinidae and one could argue that Silphidae should be added soon. Have we reached the point where we need to evaluate what Staphylinidae really is and perhaps elevate "Staphylinidae" to a superfamily? Unfortunately, for some people this is a numbers game ("the largest family of animals") and I do not see this happening any time soon.

Xenopygus species

Back in November I published a paper in Zootaxa with new species and synonymies for Xenopygus Bernhauer. There are a lot of stories that can be told about this paper and if you are skilled in reading between the lines you can probably guess some by reading the paper itself.

Xenopygus davidi Chatzimanolis

But I want to tell one of the stories here. This is the story of how sometimes we are unable to deal with the backlog of specimens (perhaps data in general) until something happens. For many years I had two new species of Xenopygus awaiting description in my Xanthopygina cabinet. This is not unusual. By a quick count, I probably have ~100 new undescribed species of rove beetles trapped in the cabinet in front of my desk. But taxonomists do not spit out species description despite being urged to do so many times because we want to put these new species into context. That context is typically a revision of a genus, a phylogenetic analysis or fauna checklist.

But back to Xenopygus. I was sitting on these two new species because properly revising the genus meant dealing with thousands of specimens of one of the most common xanthopygine rove beetles, Xenopygus analis. It also meant changing the generic concept of Dysanellus (one of the described species there belonged in Xenopygus). And it also meant dealing with some bad taxonomic decisions made in the 70s-80s.

Xenopygus pycnos Chatzimanolis

So I was waiting until, I do not know, I was ready to deal with them. The Xenopygus manuscript was probably no. 7 in my "in preparation" manuscripts. Well, that changed when Caron et al (2016) published a paper revising Xenopygus. I was not aware of that paper until it came out in Zootaxa. Which was unfortunate, because I would have told Caron et al. about all the problems mentioned above. Caron et al. published two new species that ended up being synonyms of taxa that had been described before. To their defense, it was almost impossible to figure this out unless they had seen photos (or examined) of every single species in Xanthopygina. But on the plus side, they dealt with the revisionary aspects of X. analis and that allow me quickly to publish the two new species and regrettably to synonymize the species they described as new.  

I guess the story here is that we all need motivation in our lives. Sometimes motivation to finish that manuscript comes from places we do not expect.

Plociopterus ain't no myrmecophile!

In a paper just published in Coleopterists Bulletin (pdf here), Mariana Chani-Posse and I moved two myrmecophilous species of “Xanthopygina” in Philonthina. Both species had been described by Wasmann 1925 in the genus Plociopterus. And so for the last 90 or so years, Plociopterus was known to have two myrmecophilous species. Unfortunately, several authors discussing the origin of myrmecophily in Staphylinidae (or at least specifically for Staphylinini) was using this as an example of independent evolution of myrmecophilous life style. The problem was that nobody had checked the specimens since the original description, because none of those species belonged in Plociopterus. They are Belonuchus (at least until the genus is revised) and for those keeping score at home, this is also the wrong subtribe…

The moral of the story is this: people make mistakes and generic concepts change over time, as well as our understanding or higher level relationships. As I have mentioned earlier, If somebody described a taxon 100 years ago, chances are that this taxon now belongs in a different genus or is a synonym of something else. Using raw data in biodiversity studies without going through the lens of a revision is almost guaranteed to lead to erroneous results.

As a side note, Plociopterus is in terrible need of a revision. There are multiple new species awaiting description and many taxa that have to be placed in synonymy. But the genus has an infamous history among Xanthopygina workers: at least twice people have started its revision (both in the lab of my late PhD advisor, Steve Ashe) and both times people abandoned the effort. Perhaps third time’s the charm?

Thoughts on studies using taxonomic data

tl;dr version: Your results are mostly wrong. Unless someone has revised (in a taxonomic sense) the species you are using in your study.

Longer version: People make mistakes. When we describe a new species, or a group of new species, we sometimes place them in a taxonomic rank (let’s say genus for argument’s sake) we think is correct but we cannot be absolutely sure, unless we have a very thorough phylogenetic analysis. Phylogenetic analyses are awesome, but in the age of genomics they cost a lot of money. And in many cases (incorrectly in my view), building that phylogeny is beyond the interest of the person describing these taxa.

Now consider that the majority of species were described a long time ago, long before people were thinking about phylogenetic relationships. Also, some of the early (we are talking 19-early 20th century here) taxonomists were not specialist per se, and would describe species among many different families of insects, thus not really knowing where those species belong. So, in many cases, if during the last 40 years nobody has taxonomically checked (=revise) the species you are are using, chances are that these species are: (a) synonyms of another species; (b) placed in the wrong genus or (c) placed in the wrong higher rank.

Example: in 2004 I published with several colleagues a study on when (day or night) rove beetles were active on Barro Colorado Island, Panama. If you want to read the details, the paper is here, but to save you from a lot of trouble, I just set up a flight intercept trap and for a period of 12 days I was sampling at dawn and dusk. Here is part of table 1:



My 2004 self made two three mistakes there. What we thought was Dysanellus ended up being a new genus of rove beetles described as Zackfalinus and Dysanellus is restricted to the southern part of South America. Likewise, what we thought was Philothalpus ended up being Oligotergus, because nobody had looked up before how messed up the generic limits were in Philothalpus. UPDATE: Adam Brunke correctly reminded me that all specimens identified as Quedius were indeed Cyrtoquedius based on this paper.

What I am saying is this: if you are pulling data out of a digitized collection of GBIF, good luck. I hope a taxonomist was interested in the taxa you want to use.

Of course, this idea is not new. Meier and Dikow (2004) have said this much more eloquently. 

How do you know a species is new to science?

Students often ask me, how does one go about a describing a new species? It's easy, you just have to know what has been described before! I am kidding, of course. Knowing what has been described before is by far the hardest part of describing a new species.

Here is an example: I work with a group of rove beetles belonging in the subtribe Xanthopygina, a group of 30 or so genera and ~400 species. To be able to describe a new species with confidence, I need to know how all 30 genera and all 400 species look like. Why? Because the generic limits that we recognize today might have been more relaxed in previous years, and species currently in one genus might actually belong in another (this has happened multiple times to me in the past). So if somebody wants to describe new species in e.g. the genus Plociopterus Kraatz, seeing just the existing species in Plociopterus is not good enough. People of course describe like that all the time (or by just finding a species in a "new area"), but this leads to sloppy (at best) taxonomic work.

Over the past few years I have been working with myrmecophile Xanthopygina. One of the most prominent early 20th century myrmecophile entomologist was Wasmann. His collection ended up in Maastricht and this week I was able to finally see all of the Xanthopygina species he described.

This post-it note was glued on my monitor for the last three years. A constant reminder that there were still species described in Xanthopygina that I had not seen. But now this over and I feel much better describing new species that are in or close to Plociopterus. And I have to say, I did get rewarded for insisting to see these species: one of the two  both species described by Wasmann probably belong in a different subtribe altogether.

Revision and new species of Trigonopselaphus

 I recently published the revision of Trigonopselaphus, a genus that includes some of the largest rove beetles known, with sizes ranging from 30-40 mm (trust me, this is huge size for rove beetles). The paper is available here. Previously I had blogged about the loss of the type for one of the species, Trigonopselaphus herculeanus. That species was described by Laporte and was lost in the Smithsonian fire back in the mid 1800s. So, as a good taxonomist that I am, I designated a new type (called a neotype) for that species.

I also described a new species from Ecuador and Peru, named Trigonopselaphus diplopegus. The epithet refers (of course) to the specific structure of the genitalia. But while I was working on this paper, these beetle heads looked oddly familiar.  And finally, a few days ago, I got it: anybody else see the resemblance?

Image of Blue alien head from here http://www.zazzle.com/blue_alien_head_poster-228206002344045167

Maybe little blue aliens do live among us after all. 

The 5 most rewarding papers I have ever written

Last week I wrote about the five most difficult papers I have ever written or had a hard time publishing. So today I am writing about the five "easiest"/rewarding papers I have written. I should be quick to point out that I am not talking here about short notes or small synonymy papers but rather about papers that somehow seem to flow easy, or the writing process was a breeze, or the end result was very rewarding... just read below.

Papers are in chronological orders.

1. Chatzimanolis, S., M. S. Engel, and A. Trichas. 2002. Taxonomic changes for the Aegean species of the Mediterranean darkling beetle genus Dendarus (Coleoptera: Tenebrionidae). Journal of the Kansas Entomological Society 75(4): 259–267.

I still remember with glee the writing process for this paper. I had several new taxa of Dendarus to describe and several subspecies to raise to the species level before submitting the phylogeny paper and I was really not sure how to proceed [this was my first "new species" paper]. I was sitting in my office around 11am and Michael Engel stopped by to say hi. I told him that I was lost and he was like, "well, let's do this". We were writing for about 8 hours straight, we went for dinner, and then came back and finish the paper! To this day, this was one the best writing days ever. As a side note, Michael would often abandon his day plans to help students whenever needed.

2. Chatzimanolis, S. 2005. Phylogeny of the neotropical rove beetle genus Nordus (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae) with a special reference to the evolution of coloration and secondary sexual characters. Systematic Entomology 30: 267–280.

I was expecting this paper to have a hard time in review. Not sure why - and don't get me wrong, I think this is a pretty good paper. I just wasn't expecting to hear back from the editor within nine (9!) days after I submitted the paper telling me that both reviewed had positive things to say about it. I think nine days is still the fastest (positive) response time I had from a journal and that beats all the ones claiming fast response times (e.g. Zootaxa, Zonkeys, Biodiversity Data Journal and PeerJ). I don't remember much about writing  this paper but it was part of my PhD thesis, so it was written over a period of a couple of years.

3. Chatzimanolis, S., and J. S. Ashe. 2005. Revision and phylogeny of the neotropical genus Philothalpus (=Eugastus Sharp and Allostenopsis Bernhauer) (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae: Xanthopygina). Insect Systematics and Evolution 36: 63–119.

I really miss Steve and I really miss writing papers with him. Steve passed away in 2005 and for a couple of years I have been trying to write a blog post about him, but it is still very hard to do so. Steve was my major professor and (by his request) he did not take automatic authorship in my PhD papers. The few papers we coauthored together are the ones we really worked together. And boy, Steve and I had an awesome co-author relationship: we divided and conquer, splitting the manuscript tasks and we produced (amazing, if I may) papers fast and efficiently. In this paper we described 17 or so new species of Philothalpus  and the paper took just a few months to complete (I am not including here the prep work to figure out the new species).


4. Chatzimanolis, S. 2012. Zackfalinus, a new genus of Xanthopygina (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae: Staphylinini) with description of 20 new species. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 80(4): 261-308. 

This was not an easy paper to write (20 new species) but it was a very rewarding experience: publishing color photographs for every single species and really taking the time to illustrate/photograph every single important character. Also, I think this paper more than any other (and for reasons that I do not really understand) established me as an expert in Xanthopygina among my fellow rove beetle systematists. Now, the paper took a year plus from the time it was submitted to publication, but that's not really important here.

5. Chatzimanolis, S. 2014. Darwin's legacy to rove beetles (Coleoptera: Staphylinidae): a new genus and a new species including materials collected on the Beagle's voyage. Zookeys 379: 29-41.

I have written before here and here about how I ended up describing a taxon collected by Darwin. The paper was really straightforward to write (a simple new genus and new species description) with a bit of sauce (what other rove beetles had been collected by Darwin) but it got a lot of media attention (a summary of media mentions is given here). Still, that's not the reason why this paper is here. It's here because I ended up chatting via email with David Sedaris about it (the species epithet is in his honor) and that was enough to make my day/year/decade.

New species, new characters

Scaponopselaphus diaspartos

I recently described a new species of Xanthopygina rove beetles in the Biodiversity Data Journal (I will write another post later to talk about that experience). The species is Scaponopselaphus diaspartos from Colombia. This is the second species in the genus, the first (S. mutator) described by Sharp long time ago (1876) in the genus Trigonopselaphus. The genus Scaponopselaphus was erected by Scheerpeltz (1972) when he realized that mutator was not similar to the other species in Trigonopselaphus.

The genus is rather easy to tell apart from other Xanthopygina rove beetles thanks to a unique morphological feature: the first tarsomere of the mesotarsus in males has spatulate setae. This is unheard of in other genera of Xanthopygines and that makes it a nice and easy diagnostic feature.

Mesotibia and mesotarsus of S. mutator. Arrow indicates the location of the
 spatulate tibia on mesotarsus. Scale bar = 0.68 mm. 

Spatulate setae are very common on the protarsi of rove beetles, but not so much on meso- or metatarsi.

The epithet of the new species (diaspartos) means "scattered" and refers to the distribution of the peg setae on the ventral side of the paramere. 

Sabbatical projects

My sabbatical officially starts Monday (first day of classes for the Spring semester), so I decided to put here a list of projects/papers I want to finish by August 1. The main reason for putting these up here, in public, is to try to keep myself honest more than anything else.

So in no particular order:

1. NSF pre proposal submission

This should be straight forward to accomplish, considering that the pre proposal is written. All I have to do is coordinate with the local grants office and get final approvals.

2. Revision of Smilax (not the plant :))

Currently, there are four species in the genus. This is a complicated revision because I have no access to two of the types, for reasons I am not going to address here. But I have accumulated almost all other specimens from museum around the world, and done a lot of the prep work already. Smilax species are myrmecophiles, known to occur in leaf cutter ant nests and there are a lot of bizarre (and potentially belonging to new species) specimens.


3. #365papers

An idea I got online from the twitter feed of Meg Duffy (@duffy_ma) to try to read one (new to me) paper every day. For as much as I am emphasizing the primary literature to my students, it is amazing how many days can go by without reading a paper.






4. Description of a new genus with multiple new species from South America.

This is the taxon listed as "Undescribed" genus in the phylogeny of Chatzimanolis 2014 and potentially the sister group of Isanopus. I have been accumulating materials for three years now and I doubt I could (easily) locate many more specimens without extensive field work. So I am pretty confident that this is the time to describe the taxon.

5. Research trip to Copenhagen

I plan to visit Copenhagen in March to meet many fellow rove beetle systematists. I am really looking forward to this trip because there are a few projects waiting to be finished, several new project/grant ideas to be discussed and cool types in the Fabricius collection to look over. Could I have Skyped in the whole thing? No. One week of one-one interactions is way beyond Skype can offer. Plus, when I travel I tend to focus 100% on the discussion/projects ahead, while staying here does not have the same effect.

6. Review of Phanolinopsis

Currently a monotypic genus but at least two more undescribed species and couple of other species that need to be transferred here from other genera.

7. Allometry in Triacrus?

The question mark here means that I really do not know if this is an actual project. We have taken a lot of measurements and compared males and females but we have not done any statistical analyses yet, so... to be determined I guess. I got the idea for this project when I received a box of ~20 specimens from the Natural History Museum in Vienna with amazing size differences among different males. These are interesting beetles because they are predatory of larvae of wasps and they can only be found in the refuse piles of these wasps.






8. New species in Scaponopselaphus

There are a couple new species in this enigmatic genus from South America. "This should be an easy paper to write". The last time I said that (actually I did not, my graduate advisor did) back in 2000, I ended up describing 17+ new species for a genus I thought there were just one or two more new species to describe.

So here they are, five papers, one research trip and (at least) one grant proposal. Probably overly optimistic. And these are the projects where I am the first author, there are a few others where I have a lesser role and I am not mentioning them here. I will make sure I will report back in August on how I did with all these.

Lots of new projects going on

It's been a while since I posted anything here - the semester classes and other writing caught up with me. But just wanted to post a quick note saying that we have many new exciting projects going on.

Photo by Jaimie Davis/UTC

Above is a photo of Max who is doing a massive photographic project of xanthopygine rove beetles. Max is also working with me on a morphological allometry project, but more details on that soon.  

Ten facts about rove beetles

I wrote a small blog post hosted by Christopher Buddle at Expiscor.  The post is about what I thought were 10 really cool things about rove beetles. Go read it here.

Six species descriptions

That's how many species description I have to do to finish this manuscript. And by finish, I mean be completely done. Everything else has been written, illustrations are ready, text formatted for the journal. In the pre-kid days, I would simply stay in the office as long as it took. Sometimes descriptions are written fast, other times not. From past experience, I probably need 10 solid writing hours to finish them. The thing is, I do not have 10 solid hours because I have to go pick up the kiddo for swimming at 4pm. So those descriptions will not be finished today, and simply that thought makes me procrastinate a bit more (like writing a blog post) instead of working on those @#% descriptions. I am not complaining; it is just that getting used to a life with kids (and wanting to do a decent job as a parent) is hard, even three years later. 

A beetle and a coin

A species Trigonopselaphus Gemminger and Harold next to one $1c coin. For European readers, the size of the coin is between the size of 1c and 2c Euros. Some of the species in this genus are among the largest of all Staphylinidae with total length in excess of 20mm. Perhaps some Platydracus or Tasgius are larger than this, but not by much.

When I started working on this review, I thought (naively) that due to their size it will be an easy review (easy to find specimens in museums and easy to see the characters). I have been wrong on both accounts, with just a handful of specimens among major museums and almost zero variation of character traits between species. You would think that in a >20mm beast you would not have to count punctures or setae, but...

Stephen J. Gould had written once (don't remember the specific Natural History essay) that when mammals become very large they all tend to look alike and I start to believe that this may be the case for rove beetles as well. 

Rediscovering a Darwin specimen

One of the most common questions during the last couple of weeks has been "how did you end up with a Darwin specimen?" The short answer is that I was the right person at the right time.

Here is the long answer: Insect systematists are very specialized scientists. I can identify most beetles to families. I can identify rove beetles (the family Staphylinidae) to the subfamily level and I can identify most Staphylininae (one of the subfamilies of rove beetles) to tribes and subtribes.  I can name almost all species in my taxonomic expertise (the subtribe Xanthopygina) but ask me about subfamilies of Orthoptera or Diptera and I have no clue.

Darwin's statue in BMNH

The Darwin specimen happened to belong to the subtribe Xanthopygina and I guess I was the best person in the world to tell if this was a new species and a new genus.

Back in 2008 my colleague Alexey Solodovnikov (University of Copenhagen) told me that there was a "Darwin Xanthopygine" in the Natural History Museum of London. To be honest, I think I just said "OK" and did not think much about it. Later, I even visited the BMNH and I failed to locate the specimen myself. The thing is, I was not really looking for it. My main goal during that visit was to photograph the vast type collection of Xanthopygina by Sharp. So I was really photographing types and paid little attention to unsorted materials.

Alexey later told me that he had found the Darwin specimen in a box of random unsorted Staphylinidae that included both new and historical materials. Realizing that this is a Xanthopygine, he transferred it to the unsorted materials of the genus Trigonopselaphus, as the best guess on where this specimen might belong. However, at this point neither Alexey, me or anybody at BMNH knew/realized that this specimen was considered lost according to Smith (1987)

Trigonopselaphus sp. 

Fast forward a few years and I have decided to revise the genus Trigonopselaphus (revision is in progress). Typically, one requests all described materials (types) and any unsorted/unidentified materials that belong in that genus. I requested materials from several museums, including BMNH. It was only then that I saw the Darwin specimen and quickly realized that it is a new genus and new species. But it would be another few months before I realized that the specimen was considered lost, while I compiled an inventory of all rove beetle specimens collected by Darwin.

The thing is, it takes a lot of time and preparation to be able to tell if a specimen you see is "new". If I had seen the Darwin specimen in 2004 or 2008, I would have been able to tell that is is a Xanthopygine, but I do not think I would have been able to recognize it as something new. 

Working with a Darwin specimen

Today a paper came out where I describe a new genus and species of rove beetles. The description was based on just two specimens, one from the Natural History Museum, London and one from the Museum für Naturkunde der Humboldt Universität, Berlin. We typically want to have more specimens before we describe a new species. However, I decided to go ahead with the paper for two reason (1) I have been visiting major (accessible) entomological collections for more than 12 years and I have not seen other specimens and (2) one of the specimens was collected by Darwin himself!

Below is a photograph of the holotype of the new species, Darwinilus sedarisi Chatzimanolis.

Image Copyright, The Natural History Museum, London.

The Darwin specimen was collected in 1832 and there are traces of (non water-soluble) glue on the ventral side of the specimen. You undoubtedly noticed that the specimen is "dirty".  I did not attempt to "clean" it, either physically or post processing (i.e., in Photoshop). I was both in awe and scared to death handling the specimen, so I really tried to minimize time spent handling it. To dissect the genitalia I followed the steam method described by Beulah Garner (curator of Coleoptera in the Natural History Museum, London). But I did not attempt to relax the mouthparts of move the legs, a standard practice on more recent specimens, as I did not want to press my luck.  

Here is a close up of the head, where all the dust is visible in exquisite detail:

Image Copyright, The Natural History Museum, London.

I know I could have very easily cleaned the specimen with a fine paintbrush. But in a specimen as old as this, who am I to say that the dust does not belong there, especially when it does not affect the specimen description?  In a later post I will write about how I stumble upon the specimen.