https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/93500240
I’ve told this story before and I’m happy to tell it again. This is the unicorn I never knew existed until it fell into my lap. Wedge-shaped beetles, family Ripiphoridae, are generally poorly known, uncommon, and “differ in their choice of hosts, but most attack various species of bees or wasps, while some others attack cockroaches or beetles.” The genus Ripiphorus, in particular, has many rarely seen species in North America and only two major publications in the last 100 years. Ripiphorus neomexicanus was described from two Albuquerque specimens in 1921 and a third sometime before 1929 (screenshot from Memoirs of the American Entomological Society 1929). From my research, the encounter in 2021 (link above) is the first sighting of the species in New Mexico since it was collected 100 years prior.
For something I haven’t seen, Penstemon galloensis is probably a weird (blue) color morph of Penstemon barbatus, but it could be a rare Mexican endemic that no one has found in 35 years.
