Max Barclay casually slung the shoulder bag onto the chair and pulled the white box from it. It had a label on it from the British Museum in London. He pulled the snug fitting lid off and revealed the blue-green beetle pinned to the mount inside.

Barclay, the beetle collection manager at the British Museum in London, is serving as traveling companion for the Darwin Beetle's appearance at the annual meeting of the Entomological Society of America, Entomology 2014, being held at the Oregon Convention Center, November 16-19, 2014.

The Darwin Beetle, tucked in its box inside Max's bag, is one of many given to the British Museum by Charles Darwin, famous for his work on evolutionary theory, but an unknown young scientist when he discovered the beetle in the rain forests of Argentina in 1832. The Darwin Beetle visiting Portland this week, is one of its kind. A species never seen before or since. It's possible another of its kind exists, but as urbanization gobbles up the rain forests on the coast of Argentina, where the beetle was found by Darwin, it is increasingly unlikely.

At the end of this video is an amazing, high-resolution macroscopic image of the Darwin Beetle, made by Macroscopic Solutions with their Macropod, which captures detail invisible to the human eye and which seems to defy the physics of photography. Tomorrow, I'll post a video of how such images are made, and a gallery of their fantastic pictures.