The origin of the giant ground beetle Aplothorax burchelli on St Helena Island

We investigate the origin of the possibly extinct flightless giant ground beetle Aplothorax burchelli on St Helena Island in the South Atlantic. A. burchelli was placed in the subtribe Calosomina (=genus Calosoma) of the subfamily Carabinae (Coleoptera: Carabidae), but this proposition was questioned due to its unique external and genital morphology. We conducted a phylogenetic analysis of mitogenome sequences using historical specimens of A. burchelli and samples of representative species of Carabinae. Here we deposit data files of the whole mitogenome sequences, 13 protein coding gene sequences and ND5 gene sequences used in our study.