Oskar Scheibel (1881–1953) was an Austrian engineer and amateur entomologist who specialized in the beetles of the Yugoslavian region and specialized in cave beetles of the family Trechinae. One of the most famous beetles that he described as new to science was the now endangered blind cave beetle that he named as Anophthalmus hitleri after Adolf Hitler.

Biography

Anophthalmus hitleri

Scheibel was born in Austria in 1881 and little is known of his early life but he became a railway engineer in the Austro-Hungarian region where he took an interest in cave beetles. He collected many new species and described a few himself while other entomologists named some species in his honour based on specimens that he had collected. He sold his collections of about 15000 specimens in 1921 to Germany.[1]

He is best remembered for naming in honour of Adolf Hitler the beetle species Anophthalmus hitleri in 1937.[2] The beetle is now endangered and known from just five caves in Slovenia.[3]

Part of his insect collection is now at the Natural History Museum Basel as part of the G. Frey Collection.

References

  1. ↑ Nonveiller, G. (1999). The Pioneers of the research on the Insects of Dalmatia. Zagreb: Hrvatski Pridodoslovni Muzej. pp. 105–106.
  2. ↑ Scheibel, O. (1937). "Ein neuer Anophthalmus aus Jugoslawien" (PDF). Entomologische Blätter. 33 (6): 438–440.
  3. ↑ Jozwiak, Piotr; Rewicz, Tomasz; Pabis, Krzysztof (2015-07-17). "Taxonomic etymology – in search of inspiration". ZooKeys (513): 143–160. doi:10.3897/zookeys.513.9873. ISSN 1313-2970. PMC 4524282. PMID 26257573.
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