Beautiful box of Buprestidae

I’ve been working on identifying Buprestidae accumulated from a variety of sources over the past year—mostly exchanges and gifts, before beginning the processing specimens collected during this past season. Once identified, and combined with specimens gleaned from material submitted by other collectors for identification (I generally only retain examples of species that are poorly represented in my collection or specimens that represent and will serve as vouchers for significant new distributional records), they make for a very pretty box of Buprestidae! It’s kind of nice to keep them collected together like this for a little while, but I’ll soon incorporate them into the main collection where they will more securely protected and to free up the temporary box now containing them for new material as it moves through the process of labeling and identification. (Incidentally, I think I might like to do a series a posts over this winter covering my version of the specimen curation process).

There are some very cool Buprestidae in this box—88 species in all, that originated from a remarkable variety of locations across the U.S., Mexico/Central America, and South America. Do you see any species of particular interest?

236 specimens representing 88 species of Buprestidae

Copyright © Ted C. MacRae 2012