I’m standing in a backroom of the Natural History Museum in London. Away from the hustle of the public galleries, Maxwell Barclay, senior curator of Coleoptera (beetles), passes me a shallow wooden case with a glass lid. It’s identical to the many other cases I can see around me and, like them, it contains more than 100 dead beetles on pins. Maxwell estimates that there are more than 10 million beetles in the NHM’s collection. From tiny insects scarcely bigger that a full stop to massive animals I can barely fit in my hand, and from nondescript browns to stunning metallic blues and greens, the sheer exuberance of this most famously diverse group is clear to see. And every single one of them is dead.
Citizen science
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