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Hi @WendyEM. I suggested Aeolothapsa malacella (70% confidence) based on all images in this sighting. If you disagree, please help me improve by verifying the correct species.

@CarbonAI your Aeolothapsa malacella fixation & glitch continues!

@MichaelMulvaney, I was photographing street plantings of ornamental pears(!) when I found it. There were no native trees in the immediate area.

Re a common name, would there be any value in running a competition or something for a bit of awareness raising about the value of citizen science and even Naturemapr specifically? It would never have occurred to me that this could be something significant without the knowledge I've gained through this platform.

Hi Michael, there are about 1500 species of jewel beetles in Australia of which probably less than 100 have common names (of which probably less than 20 are widely used). I’m not sure how useful they are however I guess for a citizen science project like NatureMapr it might be a little more appropriate.
Naming something after a location can be a little fraught given it’s a possibility that next year someone might find 20 specimens in Braidwood (for example) so the Red Hill Beetle probably won’t work. Having said that this specimen (the second collected for science) and the other records show that it seems to have a very limited distribution around Canberra. I thought that the Latin derivation of xystra might help but it means scraper so that doesn’t really seem very useful or appropriate. Maybe the younger generation might like the X-Beetle (which has echoes of X-Men ?). Over to you.

There is profuse flowering in eucs about 200m away, I think they are E. elata ? Same as the ones they removed from Northbourne for the tram ..