Beautiful beetle elytra

Another shot of the same beetle is here.

I like the dimples. I wonder what function they serve. When I was working at Copy Queen someone from Texas drove up for a job and their car looked pretty much exactly like that. Like someone took a ball-peen hammer to the car, stem to stern. I asked them what the heck happened. It was a hail storm.

Some of the worst hail storms listed on the Wikipedia article include–

• Around the 8th century, several hundred pilgrims were killed by a massive hailstorm in Roopkund, Uttaranchal, India.
• 5 May 1995, Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, USA, $1.1 billion insured losses. [Might even be the same that wrecked the car I saw.]
• 19 July 2002, Henan Province, China, 25 dead and hundreds injured.

I got caught in one that I thought was gonna draw blood from my scalp before I could get cover but nothing bad enough to total 40,000 cars.

There should probably be some sort of clever remark about beetles at this point to make this post coherent.