Moved from Small Carrion Beetles.

Thanks for the link to your cholevine photos. Although I don't know the genera well off the top of my head, looking at Peck's key in American Beetles, it looks like those probably are Catops, provided the elytra have a "granular surface of irregularly arranged setal bases; strigae absent" instead of "glossy surface, setal bases arranged in transverse or oblique strigae (Fig. 1.19)" (as in Tom Murray's Nemadus photo http://bugguide.net/node/view/52453). I can't quite make out in the dorsal and lateral photos what the surface is like, but think it is more Catops-like than Nemadus-like. The expanded male pro- and mesotarsi are characteristic of the subtribe Catopina, to which Catops belongs.

Peck and Cook revised Catops in a paper on the tribe Cholevini (2002, Canadian Entomologist 134: 723-787), and we have a lot of material here identified by Peck. There is, in fact, a small species they described in that paper, Catops paramericanus, that's in that size range (2.1-3.3 mm in their description), and here are the two NH localities in our collection: Coos Co., 3.1 mi S Jefferson Notch, 630 m; Grafton Co., Zealand R., 2200 ft, 6 mi SE Twin Mtn. It's a widespread species and was previously confused with C. americanus but has a few morphological differences from C. a. and is more boreal as well.

Margaret Thayer, PhD
Field Museum
Chicago