“Punk’s Not Dead.” A new species of insect has been discovered in Australia, already dubbed the “punk beetle”, it was initially believed that it’s about… bird droppings.

A Queensland researcher chanced upon the fluffy bug while camping and initially mistook it for bird droppings.

“It’s really unique. There aren’t many insects out there that have this feature,” James Tweed told the BBC. The Australian science organization CSIRO has since confirmed that it is a member of one entirely new family of beetles.

When Mr Tweed first spotted a tiny white object on a leaf inland on the Gold Coast in December 2021, he didn’t pay much attention to it. But after the entomologist took a second look, he realized that it was actually an insect unlike anything he had seen before.

“It’s about a centimeter long… and covered in long, fluffy white hairs,” he said. “A lot of hairs basically stand straight, standing up, and that’s how they give it a “Moicana” type look’.

Excited, he photographed and collected the beetle to be studied. Scientists aren’t sure exactly why the insect is furry, but they believe it has evolved to avoid falling prey to birds.

“I worked with some colleagues from ANIC (Australian National Insect Collection), who have written a book on these groups of beetles … they examined tens of thousands of specimens in museums around Australia and the worldand they had never found anything like this before (…) I don’t know any [άλλο έντομο] who has a “hairstyle” like this” commented the entomologist.

In fact, it is so different from any other species that it has been declared by ANIC as an entirely new genus or group of longhorned beetles under the official name Excastra albopilosa – Excastra means “from the camp” in Latin and albopilosa “white and hairy”.