“An inordinate fondness for beetles.”
So J.B.S. Haldane famously quipped when asked what he thought could be deduced about God through the study of natural history. He had a point. There are 380,000 (give or take) species presently known to science – with untold thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, still undiscovered and not yet described.
And of all these beetles, some 6,000 are dung beetles. Doing – literally – the dirty work of the world, these unassuming and often unnoticed creatures have for millennia been the subject of myth, folklore, and more recently, intense biological study.
Marcus Byrne and Helen Lunn recount the history of these much storied and increasingly studied Coleopterans in their new Dance of the Dung Beetles; Their Role in a Changing World from Wits University Press (distributed by New York University Press). Delving back some 3,000 years and following their subjects up to the present day, this new book seems to be just the thing for entomologists, general naturalists, and curious general readers alike.
