On the beginning

This project started in the fall of 2007 when I began as a M.Sc. student at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez (UPRM). I came here with a deep infatuation about entimine weevils, knowing that they are very diverse and that its taxonomy is very chaotic.
During my first months I became familiar with the Puerto Rican entimine fauna and learned a lot about morphology and bibliographic resources to which I didn't had access before.
As part of my duties as Research Assistant at UPRM, I had the opportunity to travel to the Dominican Republic during 20 days in the summer of 2008, intensely collecting insects, particularly weevils and more importantly entimines. We got a lot of specimens during that trip!
At that time my thesis was planned to include systematic studies in the genera Apodrosus and Lachnopus. I focused first in Apodrosus, describing 11 new species and performing a phylogenetic analysis. You can see part of the process at http://apodrosus.blogspot.com/
When it came the time to focus in Lachnopus, with the material collected in the Dominican Republic, I visited the Collection of Dr. Charles O'Brien in Arizona and during those 10 days I discovered several factors that constitutes Lachnopus as an extraordinary challenge from the morphological, taxonomic and systematic points of view.
The aim of this blog is to gather as many data as I can recall about this project, as I'm not sure if I can continue it in the close future. Perhaps I can get someone to take advantage of my history with the group... who knows?... I would like that!
At this point, we (my M.Sc. advisor Dr. Nico Franz and I) have published a phylogenetic assessment for the genus. There is so much 'accessory information' that I could not include in the paper; that is what I plan to collect in this blog. Let's see how much this impulse lasts!