Varied Carpet Beetle

Family Dermestidae — the dermestid beetles or hide beetles — contains about 1,500 species worldwide and includes some of the most economically and scientifically important keratin-digesting beetles. Anthrenus verbasci, the varied carpet beetle, is a 2-3 mm round beetle covered in characteristic mottled brown, yellow, and white scale patterning. Larvae are oval, brown-and-cream-banded, with prominent setae ('woolly bear' larvae, but unrelated to the moth woolly bear); they feed on a remarkable range of keratinous materials — wool clothing, fur coats, silk garments, animal-hair carpets, leather upholstery, taxidermy mounts, dead insects in window sills, dried insect collections in museums, dried hide and bone material, and feather-filled bedding. Like clothes moths, carpet beetle larvae have specialized gut chemistry that breaks the disulfide bonds in keratin and releases the constituent amino acids. Adults are pollinators of flowers (especially Apiaceae and Asteraceae) and rarely cause direct damage. The species' most remarkable scientific application is dermestid skeletonization. Most natural history museums (American Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian, Royal Ontario Museum, etc.) maintain colonies of Dermestes maculatus or D. lardarius (larger relatives of A. verbasci) in dedicated rooms for the express purpose of cleaning vertebrate carcasses for skeletal preservation: a carcass placed in the dermestid colony has all soft tissue (muscle, tendon, fat, dried skin) consumed within 1-3 weeks, leaving a perfectly clean articulated skeleton ready for storage or display. The technique is the museum-standard skeletonization protocol and is far gentler on bone than chemical maceration alternatives.