By the time the coyote had been in the field in Clinton, Louisiana for six days, there was little left but teeth, fur and bone. But when Alexa Figueroa, an LSU doctoral student, lifted up the leathered skin, a writhing mass of maggots revealed another world, very much alive, beneath the surface.

One bug, a small black beetle with ridges along its back, caught the attention of entomologist Dr. Stephen Baca. He identified it immediately as Oiceoptima inaequale, the ridged carrion beetle, from his encyclopedic knowledge of bugs.

As it skittered across bone, fur and a churning heap of bugs, Baca plucked it out and dropped it in a vial. It’s a type of beetle they haven’t found before on the dozen or so animal carcasses they’ve set out to decompose at the Bob R. Jones Idlewild Research Station

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