Dr Joseph Parker, a biologist with both Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History, has described a new genus of rove beetles from Brazil.

Dr Parker named the new genus Morphogenia after ‘morphogens,’ a kind of signaling molecule that functions during animal development to control the size, shape and form of organs.

Morphogenia struhli is the only species in the new genus. These beetles measure 3 mm in length and have a remarkable sexual dimorphism: males have large eyes with over one hundred eye facets, whereas female eyes have a paltry 12 facets.

Males of Morphogenia struhli also have large flight wings, while females have no wings at all. It’s likely that males do most of the searching for mates, while females don’t develop large eyes or wings and invest instead in egg production.

“The beetles belong to a group of rove beetles called Pselaphinae, a massive group of tiny beetles, amongst the commonest beetles you can find in rainforest leaf litter,” said Dr Parker, who described the new genus in a paper published in the journal ZooKeys.

“We know of more than 9,000 species of these beetles – that’s about as many species as there are birds. The big differences are that only about six or seven people worldwide work on these beetles, and unlike birds, many thousands more of these beetles await discovery, and unfortunately almost nothing is known about their ecology”.

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Parker J. 2014. Morphogenia: a new genus of the Neotropical tribe Jubini (Coleoptera, Staphylinidae, Pselaphinae) from the Brazilian Amazon. ZooKeys 373: 57–66. doi: 10.3897/zookeys.373.6788