A free field guide to Borneo's beetles — 29 species so far, from the giant, horned Atlas Beetle to the ball-rolling Thoracic Dung Beetle, each with photographs and identification notes. This list is a work in progress: beetles are the single largest group of animals on Earth, so this covers a first, growable batch rather than a complete checklist. Nothing to buy and nothing to sign up for.
What this list covers
Beetles (order Coleoptera) make up around a quarter of all known animal species, and Borneo's rainforest holds a correspondingly huge diversity — from spectacular horned rhinoceros and stag beetles to the far less flashy but ecologically vital dung beetles, longhorns and ground beetles that do most of the group's real work. This guide covers a first batch of 29 species with a confirmed, properly licensed photograph — several other candidates on the shortlist are still awaiting one and will be added as photos become available.
A number of entries here — particularly the smaller ground beetles, dung beetles and longhorns — are little-documented outside the taxonomic literature that first described them, so the write-ups lean on family and genus-level natural history where a species-specific fact isn't confirmed.
Where to find them
Large rhinoceros and stag beetles are most often found at night lights around forest lodges and edges, or feeding on sap runs on damaged trees. Dung beetles turn up reliably wherever mammal trails and dung are fresh — a genuinely productive, if unglamorous, place to look. Ground beetles, tiger beetles and longhorns are more of a daytime forest-floor and foliage find. Danum Valley, Deramakot and the Kinabatangan river lodges in Sabah are reliable general sites for several of the species on this list.
All 29 species
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