It has no eyes or wings, is honey-colored and smaller than a millimeter - but thanks to its new name, the inconspicuous beetle has now moved into the spotlight.

London's Natural History Museum named the tiny beetle after climate activist Greta Thunberg. “Nelloptodes gretae” is one of the smallest known insects.

The newly named beetle species belongs to the family Ptiliidae , which is very diverse but poorly known. To date, 65 genera and over 400 species of the tiny beetles, divided into three subfamilies, have been found and described worldwide.

Michael Darby, a research associate at the Natural History Museum in London, has been studying the tiny creatures for a long time and was also in favor of naming them “Nelloptodes gretae”, because although they were collected in Kenya between 1964 and 1965 by an entomologist named William Brock, the beetle did not yet have one name until it was identified by Darby as a new species of beetle in the museum's collection.

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The beetle measures only 0.79 millimeters and has neither eyes nor wings. Darby emphasizes that he didn't name the beetle after Greta because it's small, it just happens to be the type of beetle he's working on. In fact, he has named his beetles after celebrities several times, such as a beetle found in Bolivia that he named after him , as he is well known for his broadcasts as a natural historian in the UK.

For Michael Darby, naming the beetle was "a good opportunity" to recognize Greta Thunberg's efforts on climate change and therefore nature conservation, as he said.

Greta’s following sentences also fit this:

“Many say that Sweden is just a small country and it doesn't matter what we do.
But I learned that you are never too small to make a difference.”

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