American Beetles

''American Beetles'' is the single most comprehensive description of the

beetle Beetles are insects that form the order Coleoptera (), in the superorder Endopterygota. Their front pair of wings are hardened into wing-cases, elytra, distinguishing them from most other insects. The Coleoptera, with about 400,000 describ ...

s of North America north of the tropical area of

Mexico Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...

. It was started by

Ross H. Arnett, Jr. Ross Harold Arnett Jr. (April 13, 1919 – July 16, 1999) was an American entomologist noted for his studies of beetles, and as founder of the ''Coleopterist's Bulletin''. Born in Medina, New York, he was a star student at Cornell University, wher ...

as an update of his classic ''The Beetles of the United States''; along with Michael C. Thomas, he enlisted more than 60 specialists to write treatments of each family. The work outlived Arnett, and was published by CRC Press in 2001 (vol. 1) and 2002 (vol. 2). This is a highly technical book, with extensive references to the literature. The introduction includes a section on

beetle anatomy Beetles are insects that form the order Coleoptera (), in the superorder Endopterygota. Their front pair of wings are hardened into wing-cases, elytra, distinguishing them from most other insects. The Coleoptera, with about 400,000 described ...

that introduces all the technical terms used later. The bulk of the content consists of treatments of the 130-odd families known to occur in North America (a couple dozen are not known from North America, and are not described); the descriptive material applies worldwide, and there are brief notes about non-North American family members. A family treatment consists of a morphological description, including the larvae if known, habits and habitats, status of the classification, a key to the

Nearctic The Nearctic realm is one of the eight biogeographic realms constituting the Earth's land surface. The Nearctic realm covers most of North America, including Greenland, Central Florida, and the highlands of Mexico. The parts of North America ...

genera (and sometimes species, if the family is small), and short treatments of the subtaxa. Every family gets at least one drawing of a member, and larger families may include dozens of drawings illustrating particular characters important for classification. Note that the classification that appears in Volume 1, pp. 10–13, is superseded by a number of changes that appeared in Volume 2 (the relegation of the families Monommatidae, Colydiidae, and Bruchidae to subfamily status, and the revised spelling of

Ripiphoridae Ripiphoridae (formerly spelled Rhipiphoridae) is a cosmopolitan family of some 450 described species of beetles sometimes called "wedge-shaped beetles". Ripiphoridae are unusual among beetle families in that many species are hypermetamorphic pa ...

), and these changes have been incorporated into the

List of subgroups of the order Coleoptera This article classifies the subgroups of the order Coleoptera (beetles) down to the level of families, following the system in "Family-group names in Coleoptera (Insecta)", Bouchard, et al. (2011), with corrections and additions from 2020, with c ...

. A handful of color photographs are included in a center section. * Volume 1
Archostemata, Myxophaga, Adephaga, Polyphaga: Staphyliniformia
* Volume 2: Polyphaga {{ISBN, 0-8493-0954-9 Zoology books 2001 non-fiction books 2002 non-fiction books Encyclopedias of science Beetle literature CRC Press books