“The most luxurious longhorn beetle I've ever seen.”

An Australian researcher has discovered a strikingly hairy new beetle near Brisbane. Initially, James Tweed, a PhD candidate in biology, dismissed this magnificent animal as bird droppings.

“I was walking through a campsite one morning and something on a leaf caught my eye,” Tweed says of his discovery in December 2021. “I was surprised by the most distinctive and delicate longhorn beetle I had ever seen.”

The animal was less than a centimeter in size, was red and black, and had strikingly long white hair. “All the hair is standing up, so it looks like kind of a Mohawk.”

Tweed took photos of the insect and shared them with colleagues, but no one recognized the creature. After a long search, it was finally revealed that it is not only a completely new species, but an entirely new genus.

became the name Excastra albobilosaThe first part represents the location (“from the camp”) and the second describes the “white and hairy” appearance.

Why the animal looks like this is a matter of speculation. Tweed believes this may be a survival tactic: to predators, it looks like a rotting corpse.

For Tweed, the results confirm that his work as a biologist is useful. “Insects are the most diverse group of animals on the planet, but they are also not very popular and little studied. It is estimated that there may be up to 5.5 million species, but only a fifth of them have been described.”

He describes his discovery as amazing, because this part of Australia has been studied by his colleagues for more than 100 years. So coincidence must have played a role. “I went back several times to look for them, but to no avail.”