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Sticker of Bull-headed dung beetle
Bug card No. 0217 of 1,500

Bull-headed dung beetle

Onthophagus taurus
Eats: Leftovers and dead thingsBeetlesGardens and meadows6 legs

The bull-headed dung beetle is a small, round, black or reddish-brown beetle. The big males have two long curved horns, just like a bull. It is a very useful beetle that cleans up cow pats and buries them in the ground.

Lives in
First from southern Europe, North Africa and western Asia, now also in the United States and Australia, in cow pastures
Length
0.8 to 1 cm (0.31 to 0.39 in)
Top speed
about 0.13 km/h (0.08 mph)
On foot, estimate
Can it hurt you?
Harmless
Harmless. It does not bite or sting.
What does it eat?
It eats cow dung. Its larvae grow up inside balls of dung that their parents bury underground.
For real!Photo of Bull-headed dung beetle
Picture by (c) Don Loarie, some rights reserved (CC BY). CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

How big is it?

How long is it?

Bull-headed dung beetle about 1 cm long (0.39 in)A grain of rice about 6 mm (0.24 in)A toy building brick about 3.2 cm (1.3 in)
small enough to sit on your fingernailas long as 1.5 grains of rice in a rowcould run across a dinner table in 28 seconds

How big is Bull-headed dung beetle compared to YOU?

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How fast is it?

cool stuff

Fun facts

1

Only the big males grow long horns. Small males have tiny horns, and females have none at all.

2

Mum and dad work as a team. Dad carries dung down into the tunnel and mum packs it into balls.

3

Each dung ball gets one egg and is buried about 10 to 15 centimetres deep.

4

People brought it to Australia and the United States to help clean up pastures full of cow dung.

5

A larva eats about half of its dung ball while it grows.

you asked

Most asked questions about Bull-headed dung beetle

?What does the bull-headed dung beetle eat?

It eats cow dung, and its larvae grow up inside buried dung balls.

?Why does the bull-headed dung beetle have horns?

The big males grow long curved horns like a bull. Smaller males have only tiny horns, and females have none.

?How big is the bull-headed dung beetle?

It is only about 8 to 10 millimetres long.

For bug experts

Scientific name
Onthophagus taurus
Group
Beetles
Family
Scarabaeidae
Classification
Insecta > Coleoptera > Scarabaeidae
Lives on
Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, Australia and Oceania
Also known as
Taurus scarab

Where the facts come from

  1. Onthophagus taurus (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0): what it looks like, where it lives, what it eats, sizes and fun facts, retold in simple words.
  2. Picture by (c) Don Loarie, some rights reserved (CC BY). CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons. The round sticker of this bug is cut from the same picture.

If we got something wrong, sorry, we are bug fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.

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