Larder beetle
I’m sure everybody has seen these:
This is obviously a larder beetle, Dermestes lardarius. It is a little fellow, only about half a centimeter long or so. They get into decomposing garbage, stored foods with bad seals, and similar things[1]. Since they find our garbage so appealing, they have been carried by us pretty much around the world.
Close up, we can see that the brown patch on the back isn’t actually pigmentation in the wing covers, it is evidently a patch of short brown hairs, and the black spots in the brown region look like simply patches where the hairs are missing (although it could be black hairs, it’s hard to tell):
When flipped over, he started to flail around with his anntennae, so that you can see how they end in a clubbed structure.
I don’t have a picture of the larva, but they are a kind of bristly little grub. I think that people sometimes think that the bristles on the grubs are legs, and so describe them as something with “lots of legs”, even though they only have the normal number[2].
Larder beetles are one of the many species of dermestid beetles, a number of which are known for eating skin from long-dead corpses[3]. I’m told that a good way of extracting an intact skeleton of a dead animal is to let the dermestid beetles at the corpse, they will eat off the skin and dried flesh, but leave the bones behind, intact and nicely polished. Museums actually use them for this purpose. At the same time, museums have problems with dermestid beetles getting into their mounted specimens, and they are a big problem when they get into a traditional insect collection [4].
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[1] I used to find them a lot in old watermelon rinds on our compost heap when I was a kid.
[2] ”The normal number” being six.
[3] I don’t know whether the larder beetle is one of the species that eats skin, I’ve mostly seen them eating rotting vegetable matter. Bug Guide mentions that they are one of the species that infests museum specimens, though, so they probably do.
[4] A big part of the reason why I am doing this with photographs instead of collecting pinned specimens, is that preserving pinned specimens to keep out things like dermestid beetles is a hassle. That, and pinned specimens take up a heck of a lot more space than a few thousand digital pictures.
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