Description

The previous „Catalogue of the beetles of Belarus” was published over 25 years ago (Alexandrovich et al. 1996). Since that time numerous taxonomic changes have been introduced, new data on the already recorded species were collected, information on 868 species that were not included in this earlier list were gathered, moreover, 111 species were previously wrongly identified. New research almost doubled the species number in the families that had been poorly investigated, i.e. Staphylinidae (275 newly recorded species), Nitidulidae (36) and Cryptophagidae (33). In The Catalogue of Palaearctic Coleoptera (2004-2013, 2015-2020) 109 species were erroneously registered in Belarus. Furthermore, numerous species long known from this country were omitted. As a good example, in which these errors were corrected, may serve the separate analysis of Carabidae (Aleksandrowicz et al. 2016). In a large work like The Catalogue of Palaearctic Coleoptera, which deals with a huge number of species, concentrating on erroneous records from one region could appear overpedantic. However, as 25% of species from the well investigated fauna of Belarus were missing, the informative value of data presented there, is largely diminished. Thus, 71 common species were not included in the Catalogue, 26 species were wrongly listed in this publication.(Fragment Wstępu)