the very dark brown rather than yellow head is a point often put to those species over pusillus.

What (little) is known would favour dejavu, however not enough to make a strong case at this time.

Moved from Lady Beetles.

The history of Delphastus taxonomy and distribution in North America is fairly complicated; two Western spp., D. dejavu and D. sonoricus, were synonymized with D. pusillus but have now been elevated to separate species again. D. pusillus is an exclusively Eastern species.

I can't find a whole lot of information that would separate D. dejavu and D. sonoricus - the fact that one of them has a name that basically means "Haven't I seen this lady beetle before?" would indicate that they are physically very similar, possibly only separable by dissection. On the other hand, "sonoricus" may indicate that that sp. has a distribution limited to the Sonoran desert. I can't find much information on the ranges, either, though, and D. sonoricus definitely does range into CA; I just don't know if it's as far as Los Angeles.

I don't want this to languish at genus level, though, I'm going to pull a v. belov and create a node for "dejavu or sonoricus" so we can at least keep the eastern and western Delphastus separate.