Natural History Wanderings

The  New York Times  reports

The specimen is the first wingless male beetle ever found.

The beetle — only one-tenth of an inch and found in 1991 in Oaxaca, Mexico, among leaf litter of a pine and oak forest floor at an elevation of more than 9,500 feet by the naturalist Richard Baranowski — was most definitely a male. But it was missing one of the animal’s defining characteristics: the tough forewing casing known to scientists as the elytra.

Read story at Missing Wings on an ‘Alien’ Beetle Pose an Evolutionary Mystery