Invertebrates

SALAMANDER, n. Originally a reptile inhabiting fire; later, an anthropomorphous immortal, but still a pyrophile. Salamanders are now believed to be extinct, the last one of which we have an account having been seen in Carcassonne by the Abbe Belloc, who exorcised it with a bucket of holy water.  The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce. 1911. […]

It’s better to be a young June bug than an old bird of paradise.  Mark Twain This is a large genus of New World scarab beetles – so taxonomically they are not bugs – which are within the Insect Order Hemiptera, or true bugs.   The Phyllophaga are commonly known as May beetles, June bugs, or June beetles.  They

When a blind beetle crawls over the surface of a globe he doesn’t notice that the track he has covered is curved. I was lucky enough to have spotted it.  – Albert Einstein. These are black beetles about 0.2 – 0.8 inches in size.  The Family Tenebrionidae includes a number of genera and species that

We were generally told that centipede bites were not fatal, but two informants said that they each heard of a person dying following a centipede bite; a young boy and a priest, but were unable to provide specific details. Field Observations on three scolopendrid centipedes from Mauritius and Rodrigues (Indian Ocean).  Lewis et al. 2010. 

They sat there, on the tower, these Trojan elders,like cicadas perched up on a forest branch, chirpingtheir soft, delicate sounds.  –The Iliad, Homer. Cicadas belong to the Order Hemiptera, the true bugs, and most are in the family Cicadidae, with two species in the Tettigarcidae.  Hemiptera are different from other insects in that both the nymph