Geographic distribution is one of the major characteristics of any animal taxon, be it a species, a genus, or a family. This assumption is undoubtedly true also for beetles. Coleoptera is enormous and is probably of record size as compared to ranges of other terrestrial animals.
Beetles inhabit nearly every part of land available.
They are only absent on ice sheets of the Antarctic Continent and Greenland, on some Arctic islands and in the zones of eternal snows in the alpine areas. The extensive distribution of Coleoptera is demonstrated in the collage by our Webmaster Michael Dianov. Distribution patterns of animals on Earth are studied by zoogeography. There are different viewpoints of division of zoogeography into different disciplines. We believe that for entomologists using zoogeography as a tool in a study of an insect taxon it is sufficient to distinguish three disciplines for three phases of a typical study of a taxon's geographic distribution pattern.