Adults are about 13 mm long.
Fine-art photographic collection
Zavadilia magnifica
A metallic Madagascan leaf beetle from a genus containing only two known species.
About this species
Zavadilia magnifica(Baly, 1877)
Information reviewed15 July 2026
Zavadilia magnifica is an endemic Madagascan eumolpine leaf beetle. It is compact, strongly convex and metallic, with punctured elytra and contrasting markings over a body only around 13 mm long.
Taxonomy
Animalia · Arthropoda · Insecta · Coleoptera · Chrysomelidae · Zavadilia
Accepted taxon. · checked 2026-07-15
MadagascarBroad range and selected reference localities — not a complete occurrence map.
Madagascar
Forest foliage and woody vegetation.
Adults feed and move on leaves.
Leaves and other plant tissue.
Solitary.
What makes this species remarkable?
Zavadilia contains only two known species, magnifica and major, so this small beetle represents roughly half of the described diversity of an entire Madagascan genus.
At about thirteen millimetres, its convex shell carries deep longitudinal grooves, rows of punctures and metallic zones that remain individually resolved under macro magnification.
Bechyné created Zavadilia in 1946 around a hidden mechanical combination — deeply grooved elytra and fore tibiae maximally widened at the tip — so magnifica helped define a completely new genus almost seventy years after Baly named the species.