I found an area where one or more moose had spent quite a bit of time amid a half-dozen downed conifers, leaving a number of piles of moose dung for me to inspect. I had already become accustomed to finding rov*e beetles and grou*nd beetles under moose dung.

I broke open clumps of pellets (clumped no doubt from a spring diet of mainly evergreen needles vs. twigs later in the year) and was delighted to find an honest-to-goodness dung beetle inside one of them, one I had never seen and don't recall having even seen depicted before. Don Chandler had advised me to check out moose dung a couple years ago.

This was one of a number of new beetle species found during my several visits to the Mt. Washington area in search of the extremely rare Pyth*o strict*us.

I failed to notice the red-brown patches on the anterior pronotal angles till I saw my blown-up images.