Never underestimate science's penchant for the neat and the romantic, such as delaying the announcement of a discovery to coincide with one of its most famous members' birth.
Charles Darwin would have turned 205 today, adding a certain gravitas the pronouncement of a "new" species of beetle the "father of evolution" once donated to the Natural History Museum in London, which lost it until it re-surfaced in the late 2000s, Live Science reported.
Stylianos Chatzimanolis, an entomologist at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, was studying "tropical beetles in the New World" when he sorted through borrowed beetle specimens from the London Museum and discovered one was submitted by Darwin -- and it didn't match any other species on record, according to Live Science.
"I received on loan several insects from the Museum in London, and to my surprise I realized that one of them was collected by Darwin," Chatzimanolis said in a statement. "Finding a new species is always exciting; finding one collected by Darwin is truly amazing."
Physically, the male beetle isn't terribly distinguished from current beetles, aside from the fact that it possibly went extinct many years ago. The last sample of one caught in the wild is from 1935, according to Live Science. Chatzimanolis named it Darwinilus sedarisi, after Darwin and the author David Sedaris, the athor, humorist and nature lover whom the entomologists listened to as he sorted through vast amounts of beetle research.
Darwin, known for his fascination of beetles, collected the insect during his trip to Bahía Blanca in Argentina, part of the beginning stages of a five-year journey on the HMS Beagle (that also stopped for five weeks in the Galapagos).
"Much of the area between Bahía Blanca and Río Cuarto has been converted into agricultural fields, and it is questionable if that is a suitable habitat for the species," Chatzimanolis wrote in explaining the species' possible extinction. "One of course hopes that a newly described species is not already extinct."
