I had hoped to pass a grocery store on my way up into the foothills where I would do an all-nighter with my UV lights and set out 12 baited pitfall traps. I needed to get some meat that would rot in the bait compartments to attract certain beetle families. No grocery stores, but what I did spy was a roadkill jackrabbit on the gravel road. I gathered the deceased vertebrate inside three Walmart bags (leaked all over anyway), but not before checking it thoroughly for arthropods. There were 5 or 6 small black hister beetles underneath plus this gleaming metallic blue one.

In comparing histerids morphologically, one might note that the elytral punctuation on this one is fairly constant and uniform whereas other species have bare areas, often between the stria or in the anterior non-striated area.