Today I'm going to tell you about a weevil. There are a lot of weevils, and beetles in general, out there, but this one is special. Plucked from anonymity, this little guy was blessed, or cursed perhaps, with the mantle of greatness.
Trigonopterus attenboroughi hails from the Indonesian islands of Java, Bali and Lombok, and it was discovered in 2014 by German researcher Alex Riedel. Discovering new species can take a lot of hard work, but it seems that all Riedel had to do was walk into the forest and pick a random sampling of weevils off trees. When he analyzed DNA from the insects he'd found, it turned out that 98 of the 99 species were brand new.
Ninety-seven of the species were rather boringly named after numbers or where they were found, but one species was destined to be elevated above its humble station by a seemingly random ...
