Mingus Trail

[The15thMember]

My family and I hiked up to the Mingus Family Cemetery yesterday in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  I saw so many aggregations of little Andrena mining bees emerging.  We also saw a lot of eastern comma butterflies puddling along the trail, although they were too fast for me to get any good pictures of them with my phone camera.   

[The15thMember]

We also found this beautiful beetle, which I can't seem to ID.  I'm inclined to think it's some sort of dynastid beetle, but even after scouring Bugguide for around a hour, I couldn't seem to find any that are this color.  And Google was no help, since "large green beetle NC" and other related searches just gives me page after page of June bugs.  We also saw some interesting mushrooms and some beautiful moss sporophytes.     

[Terri Yaki]

I might be off but that looks like a Japanese Beetle to me.

[The15thMember]

*Sigh*, no, and that's exactly what my dad said when I picked it up.    Here's a Japanese beetle up close along with this beetle.  Notice the different colors and the different head.  Also this beetle had soil caked on its legs, indicating it digs, which is something Japanese beetle adults don't do, to my knowledge.  Plus this beetles was 2-3 times larger than a Japanese beetle. 

[Michael Bush]

A dung beetle?

[The15thMember]

I thought of that, but she doesn't have the shovel nose of the dung beetles (although maybe some females don't), nor that "linebacker" looking pronotum (the thorax section above the wing casings).  We see dung beetles on our farm all the time, and they also usually reflexively dig between our fingers when we pick them up, and she didn't do that.  My biggest concern is that maybe she was only reflecting green in the sun, and if she hadn't been in direct sunlight, she might just be shiny black.  Here's a picture of a rainbow dung beetle for contrast.     

[Terri Yaki]

Depending on how bad you want to know, Reddit has subs where people always know what the bug is when people ask.

[The15thMember]

Yeah, I was thinking about maybe putting it on Bugguide's ID request section.  It's a shame the NC Biodiversity Project doesn't have their scarab beetles up yet, or that would be another great place for me to look. 

[The15thMember]

The BugGuiders were able to ID it to genus level for me.  It's some sort of earth-boring scarab of the Geotrupes genus.  I was looking in right superfamily, but the wrong family.    https://bugguide.net/node/view/12537