Meet Patrick Urban, the German dung beetle specialist who discovered a new species

Patrick Urban’s new species discovery began not in a remote forest, but among beetles already collected from dung washings in Yunnan, China. Several specimens did not fit any species known to science, turning routine identification into a detailed taxonomic investigation.

Urban, a German biologist, specializes in dung beetle taxonomy and ecology. His main focus is the Onthophagini, a tribe found across the Palearctic and Indomalayan regions. He also studies other dung beetles, including members of the Scarabaeinae, Aphodiinae and Geotrupidae, as well as beetles associated with carrion.

The path to this specialized field began with studies in phylogenetics and taxonomy at Georg-August-University Göttingen, followed by biology and work in evolutionary biology and ecology at Bielefeld University. He is now a scientist at the LWL-Museum of Natural History with Planetarium in Münster, where identifying, comparing and classifying difficult-to-distinguish beetles forms a central part of his work.

A slight physical difference alone cannot establish a new species. Urban compared the unusual Yunnan specimens with related beetles and historical type material, which serves as the reference for scientific names. Detailed morphological features eventually showed that the specimens represented an independent species.

The finding was formally published in 2026. It adds a new species to the scientific record and demonstrates how much can still be discovered in natural history collections.