on this image

What we think we understand from all the comments so far is that the lighter eastern beetles were called trilinea or trilineata while the darker California ones were called daturaphila. They have now all been lumped, but the question is "Into what"? ITIS has them all lumped into daturaphila and that's where most of the images were on BugGuide, so we deleted the trilinea page we made yesterday and moved all the images here till it gets decided by the beetle experts.

What or who is ITIS? I want to inquire as to why daturaphila is preferred over trilinea. Unless someone has done recent research to warrant separating the two forms, daturaphila is too young a name to override trilinea.

link here for whatever it is worth.

On BugGuide we have used American Beetles - Volume 1 and Volume 2 as our authority with some exceptions. We think folks have been using Riley, Catalog of the leaf beetles of America north of Mexico, as the Chrysomelid authority but we're not certain. Some of the beetle specialists can give you the correct information on this.