Atlas beetle
Amazing fact
An Atlas beetle can lift things far heavier than its own body.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute
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An illustration based on the real animal.
A little discovery to share.
An Atlas beetle can lift things far heavier than its own body.
THE REAL WORLD
The real Atlas beetle
- Scientific name
- Chalcosoma atlas
- Japanese name
- アトラスオオカブト
- Group
- Insects
- Class
- Insecta
- Order
- Coleoptera
- Family
- Scarabaeidae
- Genus
- Chalcosoma
A beetle native to the rainforests of Southeast Asia.
Males have big, impressive horns, which they use when fighting each other over a female.
The larvae eat rotting logs, while adults prefer rotting fruit or tree sap.
How the Atlas beetle lives
The more nutrient-rich food it eats as a larva, the larger its adult horns become. If flipped onto its back, it cannot right itself immediately.
Howard Hughes Medical InstituteBasic data
- Diet
- Rotting fruit or sap
- Range
- Rainforests of Southeast Asia
Where the Atlas beetle has been recorded
Records: GBIF.org (CC0 and CC BY 4.0 records, retrieved 2026-11-07). Map: Natural EarthSee the records on GBIF
Watch wild animals from a distance. Do not touch or feed them, and take care of the places where they live.
Names around the world
- 日本語
- アトラスオオカブト
- 简体中文
- 南洋大兜虫
- 繁體中文
- 南洋大兜蟲
- 한국어
- 아틀라스장수풍뎅이
- Español
- Atlas beetle
- Français
- Scarabée Atlas
- Deutsch
- Atlaskäfer
- Italiano
- Scarabeo di Atlante
- العربية
- خنفساء أطلسية
Names come from Wikidata and iNaturalist records. Where a language has no recorded name, we use the scientific name.
Sources and how we check
- Houston Museum of Natural Science — Atlas Beetle (Chalcosoma atlas)Checked: 2026-11-04
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute — The Weight of the World on Its HornsChecked: 2026-11-07
We check each fact against its source. The illustrations simplify how the real animal looks.
The classification (class, order, family, genus) follows Wikidata records, checked against GBIF. Classifications can change as research goes on.
The basic data are the values given in each source. They vary with how the animal is measured, whether it is male or female, and whether it lives in the wild or in captivity.
This page was translated from the original Japanese with the help of AI.
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