The huge suborder Polyphaga, with over 340,000 named

species, accounts for almost 90 percent of known beetles,

sorted into 16 superfamilies and 156 families. Polyphaga

means “eating many things,” and this is probably one of

the secrets of the group’s extraordinary evolutionary success.

Members of Polyphaga occupy such a broad range of

ecological niches, from feeding on living plants, to dung,

to parasitism, to dead plant and animal matter, to predation.

Apart from their near-complete absence from marine

environments, there is almost no ecological niche that

is not used by members of Polyphaga, and they can be

found from the hottest deserts to well into the Arctic Circle.

The Polyphaga suborder seems to have arisen in the Permian

period, more than 250 million years ago, although such

ancient fossils are often fragmentary and difficult to interpret.

Reliable fossils of many Polyphagan families are known from

the Cretaceous period, but maybe because of the spread of

amber-producing trees, leading to much better preservation

of insect fossils. However, there is no question that the

Coleoptera suborder Polyphaga dominates terrestrial

ecosystems today.

POLYPHAGA

opposite | Sternotomis chrysopras (Cerambycidae)

Named after the green gemstone chrysoprase, this

African longhorn beetle has dramatic mandibles,

but feeds on woody vegetation.