A new species of beetle with a white mohawk that resembles bird feces has been discovered.

The longhorned beetle sports tufts of spiky hair in the style of a punk rocker. Photo: James Tweed

It looked like a «hairy turd», but on closer inspection, the mysterious object found on a leaf in the Australian rainforest turned out to be an entirely new species of insect.

Entomologist James Tweed was on a hike in dense forests beyond Gold. The Queensland coast, and he had gone to brush his teeth when he noticed a strange object.

Initially he thought it was a drop of bird feces that had grown fur as it decomposed.

>“I saw this white thing on a leaf and walked past, thinking it was nothing, maybe some bird droppings, but something in my brain told me to turn around,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

As he leaned over to examine it more closely, he realized it was an insect, and it turned out that it was not just a new species, but an entirely new genus.

“That was until I started to no digging. and I thought, 'This is something very special, something very different,'» he said.

The newly discovered insect is a type of longhorned beetle that has tufts of spiny white hair in a punk style -rocker.< /p>'Hair can imitate an insect killed by a fungus'

Mr Tweed, a scientist at the University of Queensland, said the creature's unusual appearance could be a means of convincing potential predators that it was a clump of rotting feces, growing fur in the damp rainforest.

“We have some work to do a lot more work, but the main theory we have is that these long white hairs may mimic an insect that has been killed by a fungus,” he told the Australian Associated Press.

“There are many types of fungi that reproduce, infecting insects and killing them. It could be an attempt to imitate it, and if a bird or other predator sees it, they'll think, «Oh no, it's contaminated with fungus, we don't want to try it.»

He made this discovery while at the lodge in Lamington National Park in southern Queensland in 2021. But it has only now emerged in a paper in the Australian Journal of Taxonomy.

He said he was surprised to discover a new species in a part of Australia that has been studied and documented for more than a century. “It's surprising it hasn't been found yet,” he said.

Adam Slipinski, curator of beetles at the Australian National Insect Collection, said: “It's quite an unusual beetle in many ways. We haven't seen anything like it in Australia.»

He also believes the spiny white mohawk is likely an attempt to deceive predators by claiming the beetle is a pile of feces.

«Maybe maybe this camouflage is trying to look like bird droppings, or maybe it's covered in a fungal infection,» Dr. Slipinski said.