Tibetan Species of Dung Beetle from Late Pleistocene Deposits in England

Abstract

A LARGE and distinctive species of the dung beetle Aphodius that is clearly not a member of the present day European fauna has frequently been found in deposits in England that date from the middle of the Last Glaciation^1,2. Although at times very abundant (from one peaty lens in a gravel pit near Dorchester on Thames, fossils of at least 150 individuals were obtained) the identity of this species has up to now remained a mystery. The fact that the skeletal elements were to a large extent disarticulated made the use of keys to identification impossible and, with more than five hundred described species of Aphodius in the Palaearctic region alone, it would have been imprudent to describe the fossils as a new, possibly extinct, species. Thus in accounts of fossil assemblages of Coleoptera, this species has been given the non-committal designation of Aphodius sp. A of Upton Warren after the site in Worcestershire¹ where it was first found. The solution to the identity of this species was both unexpected and dramatic.