The scientific literature shows no consistency in attributing the authorship of the name for the dor beetle, Anoplotrupes stercorosus (Coleoptera: Geotrupidae: Geotrupinae: Geotrupini). The species is widespread all over Europe, Siberia, Turkey (Nikolajev et al. 2016), and Iran (Samin et al. 2018), feeding on dung, carrion, mushrooms, mouldy litter, heaps of marc, and tree sap (Koch [1991]: 351; Byk & Semkiw 2010). Most authors who dealt with the taxon credited its authorship to Ludwig Gottlieb Scriba, the author of the paper in which the taxon was described, while few others stated that Hartmann-cited by Scriba himself in the same paper-is responsible for the name. There has been no agreement even on the publication year of the original description, although the majority of authors dated it to 1791. The aim of this paper is to establish once and for all the authorship of the specific name and the publication date of the paper in which the taxon was first described.Scarabaeus stercorosus was first described in Scriba's article "Entomologische Bemerkungen und Erfahrungen", included in the third issue of the first volume of Scriba's own magazine "Journal für die Liebhaber der Entomologie" (Fig. 1). However, Scriba integrated text from Hartmann in the form of long quotes (see below) into that paper.As far as we know, the first author who assigned authorship of the name to Hartmann alone in a scientific publication was Hoppe (1795) who wrote on page 9, "Scarabaeus stercorosus Hartm.". Previously, the reporter who wrote a review of the third issue of Scriba's journal for the "Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung", an exhaustive magazine on German and European cultural production at the time, had spoken of the "Hartmannsche Scarabaeus stercorosus" [Hartmann's Scarabaeus stercorosus] (Anonymous 1792). During the 19 th century the specific name stercorosus, as Geotrupes stercorosus, was credited to Hartmann by only a few authors, such as Mulsant (1842), Erichson (1848), Murray (1853), Mulsant & Rey (1871), and Bertolini (1872), whereas the vast majority of authors assigned the authorship of the name to Scriba. This situation had not changed until the end of the 20 th century. The authorship of stercorosus, first still in Geotrupes, later as Anoplotrupes stercorosus, continued to be assigned to Scriba, at least until the 1980s, when some authors, particularly in Poland (for example,