Registration Number AI.000632
Phylum Arthropoda
Class Insecta
Order Orthoptera
Family Anostostomatidae
| Scientific Name | Type Status |
| Hemideina broughi (Buller,1896) | holotype |
| Deinacrida broughi Buller, 1896 | holotype |
Identified By Buller, Walter Lawry
Identified Date 1896
Country collected New Zealand
Region collected South Island, Nelson
Precise locality Karamea Saddle, Nelson
Collected By Brough, J
Date collected 1895
Habitat Forest, 3,300 feet above sea-level.
Section Insects
This holotype is the actual and unique specimen upon which Sir Walter L. Buller first named and based his original description of the West Coast bush weta. The new scientific name and the description were published in the Transactions of the New Zealand Institute (forerunner of the present Royal Society of New Zealand) in June 1896. The specimen is a large, dry-pinned female weta collected by Mr J. Brough in the forest of the Karamea Saddle, Nelson Region, at about 800 meters (a.s.l.), sometime during 1895. It is one of the oldest insect holotypes held in Te Papa, and highly likely that it arrived to the museum when the Buller Collection was acquired by the then Colonial Museum at the end of the 19th century. Evidence is provided by Captain F.W. Hutton, who wrote that he had examined this holotype "…in the Colonial Museum at Wellington,…" in a paper on New Zealand wetas and crickets published in 1900. This species is regarded as one of the more primitive wetas among NZ species, and it does not strictly belong to either the giant wetas or the tree wetas.