A beetle is an insect with hard front wings that form a shell over its back, protecting the softer wings underneath. Beetles come in many shapes and sizes and live in almost every environment.
“Beetle” comes from Old English “bitela,” from a root meaning “biter,” referring to its jaws. Over time the word narrowed to describe this specific group of hard-shelled insects.
There are more species of beetles than of any other kind of animal we know—over 350,000 described. One biologist joked that if nature has a favorite shape, it might be “small hard-shelled thing with wings.”
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