Subtitle: Stranger Than Fiction. Fayetteville, AR, Jan. 19. A green June bug was found dead and dismembered near a sewer at the University of Arkansas on the afternoon of Friday January 17. The untimeliness of the occurrence raised enough suspicions for students and faculty to initially avoid any dealings with the mess of ill-strewn body parts. Later on Sunday evening, an intrepid reporter decided to return to the scene of the crime, where he then proceeded to discretely collect remnant fragments of the beetle's shell--the pronotum and a few abdominal sections. The beetle (possibly beetles, plural) appears to have been of the local variety Cotinis Nitida. However, if the remains were, in fact, dumped inappropriately by a university researcher, they might have come from Cotinis Mutabilis. No missing beetle reports have been filed recently, and the relevant authorities do not care to help with the investigation. The plight of the insects has largely been ignored by humans, and many species of Coleoptera have recently been derided for their role in ruining crops. Despite growing inter-species tensions, the unexpected, serendipitous appearance of a chiral-reflecting corpse can do no less than to inspire! Opportunist scientists, anyways, are usually not patient enough to just wait until the June emergence. Recent efforts have reconstructed a 100-200Ma family tree fo the Scarabaeidae, which also correlates development of anthophagy following the angiosperm takeover [1]. Other scientists have taken a narrower view of the Pleurosticti radiation, especially around the sub-family Cetoniinae [2]. As first noticed by Michelson in 1911, many of these beetles have iridescent shells which selectively reflect circular polarized light. One hypothesis is that this adaptation evolved concurrently with the rise of predatory animal species, as a new method of crypsis. In Scarab-shell ellipsometry, researchers today measure reflective change of polarization in terms of Mueller matrix elements, as functions of wavelength and scattering angle. Emphasis continues to fall on the element M_{1,4}, which determines conversion of unpolarized light into left or right circular polarization. For qualitative measurement, a full scientific setup is not necessary. Two opposed CPL camera filters or a pair of 3D glasses (see also [3]) are sufficient to verify chiral selectivity in the visible spectrum. For example, on the recently collected "specimen", we find the following: https://0x0.st/zF0V.jpg with row 1: ambient, row 2: CPL, row 3 opposite CPL. One of the circular polarizing filters eliminates almost all of the green reflection, while the other does not. This indicates that the species--probably a Cotinis Scarab--does have chiral-layered shell. A quick search of the literature did not reveal if full ellipsometery of Cotinis Nitida is known. Such an experiment may be of some interest during the summer months when specimens are readily available. Ultimately scientists would like to have a complete picture as to when and why chiral selectivity evolved, and this effort needs to include all relevant species, even the green June bugs from Arkansas. --Brad [1] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2014.1470 [2] https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:800022/FULLTEXT01.pdf [3] https://www.itp.uni-hannover.de/fileadmin/arbeitsgruppen/zawischa/static_htm...