Mel McQuitty was poking about under a dead hedgehog when she made the kind of discovery most entomologists wait a lifetime for.
The hedgehog was tucked into the sand-dune slacks at Benone Strand in County Londonderry. Underneath it, no bigger than a grain of rice, sat a glossy little beetle that nobody on the island of Ireland had officially clapped eyes on since 1934.
"I was really lucky to come across a dead hedgehog in the sand dune slacks and when I took a look underneath I found the little beetle," Ms McQuitty told BBC News NI. "It's a really fantastic looking beetle, it's very unique and records show it hasn't been seen in quite some time which is great news."
The species, Saprinus semistriatus — better known, charmingly, as the carrion clown beetle — is three or four millimetres of shiny black. It likes carcasses. It does not like being found. Before Ms McQuitty's sighting, the last Irish record of one dated to the year George V was on the throne and television was still an experiment.
A "routine after-work survey"
Ms McQuitty, a self-described beetle enthusiast from Northern Ireland, has been quietly walking Benone Strand at least once a week between May and August for the past three years. She calls it her "beetle drive": a one-woman campaign to plug the gaps in what we know about Northern Irish biodiversity.
When she logged the find in 2024, she had no idea she had stumbled on anything unusual. It was only when the Centre for Environmental Data and Recording (CEDaR) verified the sighting that the penny dropped.
"There are thousands of species in Ireland and, as an amateur, every beetle is pretty special," she said. "I knew it was a type of clown beetle and its family but I didn't realise it would be so rare. It was an honour to get to see it and set it on its way again."
Why a 90-year gap matters
Northern Ireland is one of the most nature-depleted places on the planet. One in nine species there is at risk of extinction, and a near-century absence from the records can mean two things: either the beetle has been lurking unseen the whole time, or it has only just turned up.
Beetle expert Dr Roy Anderson suspects a bit of both. The carrion clown is easily overlooked — "a tiny little thing, only about three or four millimetres long" — and its taste for animal corpses keeps it out of sight. But, he adds, plenty of beetle species are pushing northwards as the climate warms, and a sand dune on the north coast is exactly the sort of place a southern visitor might fetch up.
Helen James, senior curator of natural sciences at National Museums NI, says the rediscovery shows the value of dusty old museum drawers as well as new field records. The earliest Irish specimen of the species, traced through historic collections, was caught in Portrush in 1894.
For Ms McQuitty, the moral is simpler.
"I think they are fantastic and they look spectacular," she said. "The more people we have out taking time, slowing down and looking at the small things, the better."
