The penultimate book of dreams

As I was coming out my first online meeting of the day I heard a large thud at the front door. A quick look revealed a much awaited package from Pemberley Books. I then had an agonising wait until the end of the morning meetings before opening the parcel to reveal this beauty.

This is volume 3 of 4, with 1 and 4 having already been published. It's a beast of a book that covers 69 beetle families with 1088 species. The diversity of families it covers is vast: dor beetles, stag beetles, dung beetles and chafers, jewel beetles, click beetles, glow-worms, soldier beetles, ladybirds, tenebrioids, false blister beetles, oil beetles and cardinal beetles. It's the volume that really emphasises the diversity of species in the UK and Ireland. Everything from the mighty Stag beetle through to the tiny Cortinicara gibbosa. Flicking through I kept finding new families to look at. Groups that I have recently been looking at a fair bit such as latrids and ptinids are also covered. 

It's an amazing piece of work and having only had it one day I've only made an initial foray into its contents. It's going to be interesting to see how certain groups fall out from the keys. I'm keen to see how elaterids and mordellids key out given the difficulties I've had with other keys. It still uses the scutellum shape as an initial division for the former that I've never been a fan of but presumably there's not much else to do this and I just need to be better at differentiating the two forms.

The quality of the figures is high and brings together in one place stuff from a diverse range of sources. This will reduce the constant flicking between online keys, papers, books and websites that I currently employ for various groups.

There's a lot to get my head around. A new key for Atomaria using the pronotal pubescence characters that were presented in the recent issue of the Coleopterist. Some seriously detailed gentialia diagrams for the nightmare that is Cryptophagus.

Crypotphagus genitalia

Flicking through again just now I'm reminded that Meligethes is also covered. Another of the groups that give coleopterists of all levels a real headache some times. So much here to unpack and digest.

There's going to be a 4 year wait until the final volume arrives. Volume 2 will be devoted entirely to staphs. That's the one that I'm really looking forward to. Hopefully a game changer for the aleochs. For an interview with Andrew Duff about the new volume and the series more generally I'd recommend reading this.

Finally, flicking through the plates at the end was always going to be fun to get a feel for what's out there that I'm yet to be aware of, yet alone seen.

I was immediately struck by a beetle that now might have trumped Oxyporus rufus for the crown of beetle I most want to see. Macronychus quadrituberculatus. What a creature! One to find on submerged logs in deep water of clean rivers in southern England and south-east Wales. Given my limited attempts at water beetles this one may take a life time to find. But I guess with beetles that's the whole point. You're never going to see them all...