Charles Darwin had kind of a affair for beetle , and would go to great lengths to collect and study them . In 1846 , he publish to a acquaintance about one of the entomological adventure he had looking for priming beetles :
During his noted ocean trip on theBeaglein the 1830s , Darwin collected fossils and support animals for his research wherever he could , including plentitude of mallet . Among them was a type of rove beetle — a appendage ofStaphylinidae , the expectant beetle kinsperson — that was nameless to scientific discipline .
Unfortunately , before Darwin — who apparently could not bear to lose a beetle — or any other life scientist could formally describe the Modern mallet and name it , the specimen was misplaced somewhere in the aggregation of the Natural History Museum in London .
Skip ahead almost 200 years , to the present day . Stylianos Chatzimanolis , an bug-hunter at the University of Tennessee , has been working over the last few year to update the family tree of a hoagy - group of rove mallet . He ’s pass many hours in his lab examining specimen borrowed from all over the world and lick on ms ( while listen to David Sedaris audiobooks ) . One solar day , he noticed that one of the mallet had notched antenna , a trait that ’s not coarse among rove mallet . connive , he looked into it a slight more and discovered that the unknown beetle was on loan from the Natural History Museum , and was the baffled beetle take in by Darwin in Argentina .
The beetle was recorded as specimen number 708 by Darwin in his tone , and then stored at the museum among unsortedStaphylinidaespecimens , presumably because no one knew what it was or where it belonged . finally one of the curators noticed it while class these materials and , taking a best guess , moved it to storage with the genusTrigonopselaphus , to which it bore a resemblance . This chance to be the same genus that Chatzimanolis was researching , and when the museum sent over itsTrigonopselaphuscollections , specimen 708 made a 2d trip over the Atlantic , this time to be rediscovered instead of lost .
After canvass the mallet more nearly , Chatzimanolis decided that it was n’t a penis ofTrigonopselaphus , but a Modern genus . Hedubbedthe groupDarwinilusin honor of Darwin , and named specimen 708 ’s speciesD. sedarisias a nod to the writer who harbour him while he worked . He published his description of the mallet on Darwin ’s 205th birthday , February 12 , 2014 .
Despite searching in many major museum collections , Chatzimanolis has only been capable to find one other specimen ofDarwinilus sedarisi , which date stamp from 1935 or before . Chatzimanolis thinks the lack of specimen may be because the mallet spend most of their clock time hiding and feed in the wish-wash piles of ant colonies . Most of the area around the speckle where the two mallet were found , though , has since been disafforest and turned into farmland , so it ’s also possible the beetles evaporate for deficiency of a place to live . “ One of course of instruction hopes that a new described specie is not already out , ” says Chatzimanolis .
