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What’s red, black, and hairy all over? A new species of bug discovered in Australia, dubbed by some as a “punk beetle” for its shaggy white locks.
A Queensland researcher spotted the fluffy specimen by chance while camping and initially mistook it for bird poo.
“It’s very unique. There are not many insects out there that have that trait,” James Tweed told the BBC.
The national science agency CSIRO has since confirmed it’s an entirely new family of longhorn beetle.
When Mr Tweed first spotted a tiny white object on a leaf in the Gold Coast hinterland in December 2021, he didn’t think much of it.
But after the entomologist did a double take, he realised it was in fact an insect unlike any he’d seen before.
“It’s about one centimetre long… and covered in long, fluffy white hairs,” he said.
“A lot of the hairs stand basically straight upright, and so it gives it a bit of a mohawk type look.”
Excited, he photographed and collected the beetle to be studied.
After posting to a Facebook group of insect enthusiasts turned up no answers, Mr Tweed – who is a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland – took the bug to the CSIRO’s Australian National Insect Collection (ANIC).
“I worked with a couple of colleagues from the national insect collection, who literally wrote the book on these groups of beetles… they examined tens of thousands of specimens in museums all over Australia and the world, and they’ve never found it
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