Things have been quiet here for quite a while – mostly because I’ve been inundated with work (always a good thing). But I have also recently joined the party eight years late to the Twitter train. For daily images of cool insects please follow me over there @skepticalmoth. Of course some stories require a longer format to discuss, and I will continue...

As I was photographing and databsing the Cicindelinae from the collections of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science I came across this specimen collected on the 10th June 1921, Chicago Illinois. The beetle is Cicindela hirticollis hirticollis (could be a boldly marked ssp rhodensis as they readily intergrade along their boundaries) and is one of...

This beautiful animal is a moth I reared from Quercus palmeri down in the Chiricahua Mountains of Arizona. It’s in the family Gracillariidae and most likely in the genus Acrocercops – according to Dave Wagner it may represent a new species, but that’s not an uncommon thing with small moths. It was fairly abundant, so the short series I have will probably...

Have you seen the beautiful photos taken by Sam Droege for the USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab? Ever wondered how he got those beautiful shots? Tomorrow, September 26th at 1pm eastern time, Sam will be doing a LIVE tutorial on YouTube on how to take these photos and how to do it on your equipment! Go to the YouTube channel and a live feed should...

I’m excited to be participating this year as an instructor for the Lepidoptera Course at the Southwestern Research Station near Portal, Arizona. I’ll be one of eight other instructors who will provide a hands on and intense 9-day long course on the collection, preservation and identification of Lepidoptera. I really can’t imagine a better way to learn...

I came across this short article today claiming that this recent description of the hairstreak butterfly, Ministrymon janevicroy Glassberg 2013, may in fact be the “last truly distinctive butterfly species left to be discovered in the United States…. [and] the era of new U.S. butterfly species is ending”. I find that statement a little bit odd. One...