While camping on the Gold Coast of Australia, researcher James Tweed found a beetle that he described as looking like bird pooh on a leaf. He looked more closely to see a centimeter long beetle covered in long white hairs. He collected the unusual insect and asked beetle enthusiasts on-line if they had ever seen one before. After receiving no information, he next consulted the Australian National Insect Collection. Again, nothing was found in the extensive collection resembling the beetle he found in Queensland. Mr Tweed, a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland, told interviewers that, "I worked with a couple of colleagues from the national insect collection, who literally wrote the book on these groups of beetles...they examined tens of thousands of specimens in museums all over Australia and the world, and they've never found it before."
AUNIS eventually declared the bug a new insect so different it was put into a sepearate family of long-horned beetles, and named Excastra albopilosa Scientists are not sure, but they think the fuzzyness is a mimic of an insect being killed by a fungus, which repells possible predators.
One thing for sure Mr. Tweed has a ready-made thesis subject describing for science his new beetle.
