A visit to the Natural History Museum in 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 in the beetle collection 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 journal ZooKeys.

The beetles belong to a group of rove beetles called Pselaphinae, a “massive group of tiny beetles, amongst the commonest beetles you can find in rainforest leaf litter,” according to Parker, a Pselaphinae specialist.

The beetles measure only 3 mm in length and the males and females are very different in appearance. The males have large eyes with over one hundred facets, and they have large flight wings. On the other hand, the female eyes contain only 12 facets and they are practically wingless. It’s likely that males uses their superior eyes and wings to find mates, while female invest instead in egg production.

This is a comparison of the heads of male and female Morphogenia, showing remarkable eye size differences. Photo by Joseph Parker.

“We know of more than 9,000 species of these beetles — that’s about as many species as there are birds,” Dr. Parker said. “The big differences are that only about six or seven people worldwide work on these beetles, and unlike birds, many thousands more of these beetles await discovery, and unfortunately almost nothing is known about their ecology.”

Parker, who is also a developmental biologist, named the new genus Morphogenia after “morphogens” — a kind of signalling molecule that functions during animal development to control the size, shape and form of organs.

The beetles were found at the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project. This vast ecological experiment was set up by the Smithsonian Institution and Brazil’s National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA) to investigate how forest fragmentation affects communities of plants and animals.

“With so few people working on groups of organisms like this, it’s hard to know what role they play in nature. The fact there’s so many species, and they’re so abundant, suggests they’re doing something important,” added Parker.

Read more at:

– Morphogenia: a new genus of the Neotropical tribe Jubini (Coleoptera, Staphylinidae, Pselaphinae) from the Brazilian Amazon