Home time period	Future
Creature type	Arthropod
Deaths caused	ARC Soldier (Episode 5.4)
Appearances	Episode 5.4

Future Beetles are eusocial, swarming, carnivorous beetles from the Future.

Facts

Future Beetle drones are each about an inch long, while queens are each about the size of a small dog. Like cockroaches, it's also very hard to to kill Future Beetles. Unlike modern day beetles, Future Beetles live in colonies, each with thousands of drones and a queen; the queen Beetle controls the drone Beetles, and the drones follow the queen wherever it goes.

The bite of a single Future Beetle alone is virtually harmless (unless the bitten victim is allergic to insect bites, in which case the bite will cause a severe allergic reaction). But in swarms, Beetles' bites are collectively so strong that they can chew through reinforced concrete in minutes, and can eat a full grown man alive very quickly; to the extent that within seconds of bringing the victim down, there will be no trace of it left.

In Primeval

Episode 5.4

A scout Future Beetle came through the First Man-made Anomaly into Connor Temple's lab in the Anomaly Research Centre in the present day, but was caught and sent back through by a guard. As a result, a whole swarm of Future Beetles then came through into the lab, killing the soldier and triggering the ARC's lockdown. After the swarm's Queen came through, the Beetles burrowed through the lab's walls and into the ARC's air shafts.

The ARC team trapped the Queen Beetle in a box when she and the swarm fell in the control hub through an air vent, and they began killing the Future Beetles with pesticide. At first, their plan worked, but the workers started chewing through the box and helping the Queen out. Becker then killed the Queen with his EMD, and without the Queen to control them, the drone Beetles started spreading out all over the ARC.

The Future Beetles "developed a taste" for the wiring in the ARC's walls, and began to tunnel through the walls. Connor recalibrated the First Man-made Anomaly to release a huge gamma ray into the ARC, which killed all the Beetles before they could burrow out of the ARC.

Trivia

• The Future Beetles are similar to the siafu from Indiana Jones and the scarabs from the 1999 film The Mummy.
• As the Future Beetles are incredible burrowers, and due to the harsh conditions on the surface of the Sterile Earth, it has been speculated by a few fans that they probably live primarily underground.
• As Future Beetles have many similarities to cockroaches, some fans have theorised that the Beetles evolved from cockroaches in the Sterile Earth Future to adapt to the Sterile Earth's harsh conditions.
• They behave somewhat like army ants, gathering in swarms to overpower victims hundreds of times their own size. Also, just like ants they live in colonies that consist of workers controlled by a queen.
• These beetles are eusocial like ants, bees, and termites, even though few, if any, beetles behave this way in the present. They likely evolved a social life due to the fact that all other known surviving species in the Sterile Earth future are large animals, and since they were too small to attack large prey singularly, they had to evolve a colony life in order to overpower larger species with their sheer numbers.
• Future Beetles are similar to Jurassic Beetle drones.