I examined this specimens and it has black antennal scapes, probably true C. clavipes (not C. puniceus) - unless I misunderstood something. C. puniceus appears restricted to SE Alaska in Alaksa. (Elevated back to species status by Kadej et al. 2022. C. puniceus has red antennal scapes. Type locality of C. puniceus is Sitka.)

The most frustrating thing is that ALL of his distribution points exclude all of the central US and Canadian states, including the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma & Texas, even though there are plenty of points from those states from iNaturalist.

basically it just seems like they ignored the central states and the weird populations for ease of analysis.

"Von Mannerheim (1843) described the species from Baranof Island
in southern Alaska. The adults are externally very similar to C. clavipes. The only difference is the red coloration of the antennal scape, however, specimens with black scape are known from Alaska (Lee and Thomas,2011)"

Figure 4, bottom right images basically has all Cucujus puniceus west of Nebraska and all C. clavipes east of Alaska.

So basically, he defined the species based on larvae, and said that adults can be identified via distribution (best character) and antennal scape color (second best character)(except when they can't). I think Lee and Thomas basically said that there are two populations of C. puniceus with the black antenna west of Nebraska - some in Colorado and some in Alaska.

But I also don't know if any of these specimens were included in their molecular analysis.

So, not a simple answer. Would love to discuss at ESA. It's certainly still worth looking at I think.

I'm pretty sure that everything in BIN BOLD:AAQ0047 should be called Cucujus puniceus (type locality of Sitka (Baranof Island), Alaska & all the Alaska DNA barcoded specimens in that BIN are from near Sitka).

I need to DNA barcode some Cucujus from interior Alaska, which have black scapes. I suspect they are true C. clavipes which has black scapes (contrary to the statements in Lee & Thomas 2011 which suggests some Alaskan puniceus have black scapes.). I think prior workers assumed that all the Cucujus in AK were conspecific but I think we have both species (C. clavipes in mid & western AK and C. puniceus in southeast AK). And regarding what's going on outside of Alaska, I dunno!