Mario Cupello
Area of Taxonomic Interest: Coleoptera
Country: Brazil
Homepage: https://mariojcupello.wixsite.com/cupello
Role: Elected: February 17, 2025
Summary of Research & Education:
Mario Cupello’s primary research focuses on the systematics and evolution of scarab beetles (Scarabaeoidea), one of the largest clades among the Coleoptera. He is fascinated by the diversity of scarabs in all its facets, from morphology to behavior to development, and wants to understand how this has been shaped over the eons by natural selection and other evolutionary processes. His ultimate ambition is to produce a synthesis of the biological knowledge about the group.
Mario received his BA in Biology (focus on Zoology) in 2014 from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), his MSc in Zoology in 2016 from the National Museum (UFRJ), and his PhD in Entomology in 2022 from the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), all in his native country of Brazil. After a brief period as a postdoctoral fellow at UFPR, he joined Texas A&M University as the Assistant Curator of Entomology in 2023. There, he is responsible for the care and study of one of the largest entomological collections in the southern US, numbering more than 3,000,000 specimens of insects and arachnids. Among other functions, he is also a topic editor in two journals, Bionomina and Neotropical Biology and Conservation, and has been teaching courses on evolution, systematics, and nomenclature in several Brazilian universities. He has done fieldwork throughout Brazil and undertaken scientific research in more than 40 natural history museums across Europe and the Americas.
Since 2012, he has produced nearly 50 scholarly works, addressing the microtaxonomy of almost 200 species of Neotropical dung beetles (Scarabaeinae) and topics in phylogenetics, nomenclature, sexual selection, adaptation, biogeography, and conservation. He is also interested in the theoretical and historical basis of systematics and evolutionary biology and has been promoting the organization of a new integrative discipline for the study of species, Speciology, with the establishment of a new speciological model-system in the Coleoptera, the genus Ateuchus (Scarabaeinae: Ateuchini).
His main contributions toward nomenclature derive from his taxonomic monographs as well as his role as the editor for the superfamily Cleroidea (Coleoptera) in the Taxonomic Catalog of the Brazilian Fauna, the world’s largest faunistic inventory project. His interests as a Commissioner lie mostly in issues relating to nomenclatural concepts, the wording of the Code, the modernization of nomenclature to reflect advancements in biological sciences, and the improvement of the public perception of systematics.
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