Small Metallic Jewel Beetle
Anterior Femoral Inner Spine
Small Metallic Jewel Beetle
Antenna
| Small Metallic Jewel Beetle Anterior Femoral Inner Spine | | Small Metallic Jewel Beetle Antenna | | ||
 | Class: | Animals (Animalia) - Jointed Legs (Arthropoda) - Insects (Insecta) | |||
| Order: | Beetles (Coleoptera) | ||||
| Family: | Jewel Beetle (Buprestidae) iNaturalist Observation | ||||
| Species: | Small Metallic Jewel Beetle (Chrysobothris sp) | ||||
| This Photo: | 🔍Face🔎 | ||||
Thank you Stephan Gottwald for identifying and Dr Peter Lang & Joshua Basham for confirming the id of this species for us General Species Information: Found on Ellura (in the Murray Mallee, SA) and elsewhere ~7.5mm long. We confused this for a Melobasis sp. Superficially they are incredibly similar to the 2 Melobasis that we photographed. There are a lot of differences when you look more closely. The face is less hairy, antennae shorter, elytra more rugose, elytra quite pointy at the front, BUT most importantly about half the size of the other two. To highlight the differences between this & Melobasis, Stephan said "The anterior femora have a noticeable inner spine" (it's visible in the antenna shot). Further Peter said "The shallowly depressed, differently-coloured fovae on the elytra (pinkish in the first image here) are characteristic of the genus." | |||||
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