#euryscaphus

One of the other things I found lying around on the ground at Cue - in fact, when I was poking around a small red sand dune next to the dry Lake Austin, I kept finding little piles of dismembered beetle remains. It took me a while to figure out that they were owl pellets, or those of similarly predatory birds. Certainly, the claw marks on that big abdomen I’m holding, and the fact that some of the beetles I was finding can’t fly, suggest that what was eating and regurgitating them had sharp claws and a hooked beak.

Anyway, the Scaritine Ground Beetles - Euryscaphus, Scaraphites, Carenum and others - are generally large, and black, and have a constricted waist and massively over-sized heads and jaws. Like the majority of the Ground Beetles (Carabidae) ferociously carnivorous.

Without a whole specimen, I’m not sure which of Australia’s diverse species this is, but I suspect a Euryscaphus.