PSYCHE 
Vol. 68 March, 1961 No. 1 
AUSTRALIAN CARABID BEETLES V. 1 TRANSITION OF 
WET FOREST FAUNAS 
FROM NEW GUINEA TO TASMANIA 
By P. J. Darlington, Jr. 
Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, Mass. 
Introduction 
Beetles of the family Carabidae (predaceous ground beetles) are 
numerous in tropical rain forest in New Guinea and numerous also 
(but less diverse) in cool south temperate rain forest in Tasmania, 
but no species and hardly any genus is common to the two faunas, and 
even the dominant tribes are different. However there is no single 
boundary between the New Guinean and Tasmanian faunas, but a 
broad and complex transition, which I shall try to describe. 
My interest in this part of the world began with the Harvard 
Australian Expedition of 1931-1932, when I collected Carabidae in 
eastern Australia north to part of the Cape York Peninsula, as well 
as in southwestern Australia. In 1943-1944 I spent eleven months in 
New Guinea as an army entomologist, and was able to collect 
Carabidae especially in lowland rain forest at Dobodura, Papua, while 
hospitalized there, and in mountain forest on the Bismarck Range, 
Northeast New Guinea, in lieu of leave. I have sorted and arranged 
my own and much borrowed material and am now more than half way 
through writing “The Carabid Beetles of New Guinea” (see Darling- 
ton 1952), so that I have a good knowledge of New Guinean Carabi- 
dae. Recently, from December 1956 to June 1958, I have been again 
in eastern Australia, traveling and living in a small truck with my 
wife and fourteen-year-old son, and collecting Carabidae in practically 
every important piece of wet forest from the northern tip of Cape 
Tarlier parts of this series are listed in the reference list at the end of 
this paper. 
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