Darkling Beetles of the Sinai Peninsula

An expanded and updated edition of the out-of-print 2003 supplementum of Zoology in the Middle East, this concise guide to Darkling Beetles of the Sinai Peninsula has been sought after by researchers in taxonomy, faunistics and biogeography. The new book includes two additional subfamilies of tenebrionid beetles (4-5 species), identification keys and more than 90 colour photographs and species distribution maps.

Zoogeographically speaking, the Sinai Peninsula is a crossroad and, at the same time, a center of speciation. Despite its generally arid character, the region harbours a wide range of habitats, from sea level to over 2,500 m above. About 10 percent of the Sinai darkling beetles are endemic to the area. The inclusion of species photographs and identification keys makes this book an invaluable reference field guide, for both specialists and non-specialists, who will thus be able to discover the taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity of darkling beetles in the Sinai Peninsula.

Dr Martin Lillig works for the environmental and nature conservation association Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Deutschland (Friends of the Earth, Germany) and freelances in nature conservation. He received his doctorate in environmental sciences from the Faculty of Science at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Since studying biogeography in the 1980s at the University of Saarland, Germany, he has been particularly interested in entomology, especially beetles. The taxonomy, systematics and zoogeography of the Tenebrionidae are his special fields. He has published about 70 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals and several book chapters. Since 2020, he has been subject editor of the journal Zootaxa for Tenebrionidae. He also writes peer reviews for numerous other journals. On his research trips he visited Zimbabwe, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt (Sinai Peninsula), Israel, Jordan, Canary Islands, Madeira, Cape Verde Islands and various European countries like Portugal, Malta, Greece, etc.

Dr Tomáš Pavlíček, RNDr, PhD is a senior researcher at the Institute of Evolution, University of Haifa, Israel. He obtained a Ph.D. (= CSc.) of the Institute of Entomology, České Budějovice, Czech Academy of Sciences. He has been conducting parallel research in entomology, vermicology and botany (cereals), always interested in the fields of evolutionary genetics, population genetics, ecology and zoogeography. He has co-authored eight monographs and published more than 130 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. His research trips have taken him to regions of the world as varied as French Guiana, Brazil, New Caledonia, Mayotte, Guadeloupe, Mauritius, Japan, Turkey, Portugal, the Caucasus, Jordan, Israel and the Sinai Peninsula.