Overview
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 wētā. 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 wētā 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 wētās and crickets published in 1900. This species is regarded as one of the more primitive wētās among NZ species, and it does not strictly belong to either the giant wētās or the tree wētās.