Claudia Alejandra Medina U.

Claudia Medina at the blue house of Frida Khalo's Museum in Mexico, 1997.

Claudia is a Colombian entomologist interested in evolutionary aspects of coprophagous beetles. Her early research on dung beetles concerned diversity inventories and ecology. Her principal research now is the evolution of dung beetles, especially phylogenetic reconstructions. For her MSc. thesis she conducted a study of the morphological variation of the genus Canthon by comparing it with other genera of American Canthonini. She was a PhD. student in the Department of Zoology and Entomology at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and for her PhD. dissertation she worked on a cladistic analysis of the entire tribe Canthonini, including representative genera from each region (America, Africa, Australia and Asia). She has found that the general external morphology of Canthonini beetles is high in convergences, and so she is looking for suitable characters in the internal morphology. She is studying the female and male genitalia and doing a detailed study of the internal sac of the aedeagus and its sclerites.