Biomedical Ephemera, or: A Frog for Your Boils

Dermestidae of Germany, including larvae and morphological details

Dermestids (specifically Dermestes lardarius) are a favorite beetle of museums and those who prepare bone specimens on a moderate-to-large scale. When maintained as a large enough colony, they’re an invaluable resource in cleaning the last of the flesh and fat from animal bones, and produce a much better final specimen than boiling or bleaching bones does (as boiling causes fat to be absorbed into the bones and bleaching is both dangerous and ineffective).

They’re also used in forensic entomology, as they’re scavengers, and they only appear when (and if) the flesh of a cadaver begins to dry out. They refuse to eat rotting flesh, and they refuse to live in a wet environment, so the weather and climate plays a significant role in determining the amount of time that would have passed before the beetles would have arrived.

Fauna Germanica: Die Käfer des deutschen Reiches, Vol III. Edmund Reitter, 1911.