The California Floristic Province is one of the world's great biodiversity hotspots. Ten thousand or more species of beetle call California home. Some are considered pests, but these are far outweighed by the countless species helping to keep our valuable ecosystems going. This website is dedicated to increasing appreciation and providing information on these fascinating and beautiful insects.

The links to the left lead to taxonomic checklists, a comprehensive, queryable distributional database, descriptions of past fieldwork, a gallery of images of California beetles, ecological information for many of our species, and detailed information on several beetles considered endangered or threatened in California.

Until early 2014 the California Beetle Project formed one of the major research directions of Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History Curator Michael Caterino. Dr. Caterino has since left the museum for a position at Clemson University, but these pages will be maintained to serve the data that resulted from those efforts. These data form the core of the SBMNH Entomology collection's online catalog.

Thank you for your interest in California beetles.

NOTE: As of 2014, the California Beetle Project page is no longer updated. The original database and list of California beetles in the menu on the left will remain for the time being, but the information contained within is not necessarily current. SBMNH Entomology Curator Matthew L. Gimmel has divided up the function of the original database into two conceptual halves:
1) the SBMNH Entomology specimen-level database, including all SBMNH beetle specimens included
in the CBP database, which is now available (and ever-growing) through the ecdysis portal at https://serv.biokic.asu.edu/ecdysis/; 2) a literature- (and available specimen-)based checklist
of the Coleoptera of California, which is being revised and re-compiled by Dr. Gimmel, and, as of January 2017, is about 85% complete.