identifying beetles

[Doug Yanega]

This description:

>The back of the lower thorax is
>black..the prothorax is yellow with a kind of square black
>design in the middle.

Is not the same as the one I responded to elsewhere:

>Round, and a little larger than a penny, with black
> thorax and yellow upper thorax with a square little design

Both these descriptions are technically incorrect and confusing (the wing
covers can't really be called "the lower thorax" - in beetles, you see,
only the prothorax is normally called the thorax.), and from your first
description I'd figured the thorax was black and the wing covers black and
yellow. Your second description reverses that, in which case they could
definitely be carrion beetles, though it's odd that they'd be sitting on an
oak tree since they aren't herbivores.

Peace,


Doug Yanega       Dept. of Entomology           Entomology Research Museum
Univ. of California - Riverside, Riverside, CA 92521
phone: (909) 787-4315
                http://insects.ucr.edu/staff/yanega.html
  "There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness
        is the true method" - Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chap. 82