Meet the Beetles: Stunning Museum Specimens from London

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Scarabaeidae

beautiful beetles

(Image credit: Natural History Museum London/Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2)

Beetles in the Scarabeidae family are known as scarab beetles, a group that includes approximately 30,000 species distributed around the world.

Scarab beetles have stout bodies, and many species also have powerful front legs that they use for digging. This unidentified species was collected in Colombia.

Thanatophilus lapponicus

beautiful beetles

(Image credit: Luxmmi Varathan & Craig Perl/Natural History Museum London/Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2)

Thanatophilus lapponicus is also known as the northern carrion beetle. This species was described in 1793 by the German naturalist and entomologist Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Herbst.

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Mindy Weisberger
Mindy Weisberger
Live Science Contributor

Mindy Weisberger is an editor at Scholastic and a former Live Science channel editor and senior writer. She has reported on general science, covering climate change, paleontology, biology and space. Mindy studied film at Columbia University; prior to Live Science she produced, wrote and directed media for the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Her videos about dinosaurs, astrophysics, biodiversity and evolution appear in museums and science centers worldwide, earning awards such as the CINE Golden Eagle and the Communicator Award of Excellence. Her writing has also appeared in Scientific American, The Washington Post and How It Works Magazine.  Her book "Rise of the Zombie Bugs: The Surprising Science of Parasitic Mind Control" will be published in spring 2025 by Johns Hopkins University Press.