Thomas Vernon Wollaston published this drawing in his book ‘Insecta Maderensia’ in 1854. In the book he thanks Westwood for providing the illustrations, ‘Particularly, however, would I draw attention to the valuable help which I have received from J. O. Westwood, Esq., whose pencil has been so elaborately employed in the figures which I am thus enabled to attach, and by whom many of the minutest of the dissections were accomplished, — with a degree of delicacy, moreover, to which I did not myself at the commencement of this Work (though I have since succeeded in anatomizing the larger portion of them, likewise) lay claim.’ Wollaston wrote the following about this species:

‘A most distinct and truly indigenous little Bruchus —being moreover the smallest member of the genus with which I am acquainted, averaging about three quarters of a line in length. [...] Its habits are of a very exclusive nature, it being confined, so far as I have hitherto observed, to the lichen of the exposed weather-beaten peaks,—amongst the thick masses of which in the crevices of the rocks of Porto Santo and the Dezerta Grande it literally teems. I have not as yet detected it in Madeira proper, but in the former of those islands I might have captured it by thousands during December 1848 and April 1849 ; whilst, in May of 1850, it was scarcely less abundant on the latter,—particularly in the dried bunches of Ramalina scopulorum and Evernia prunastri, in company with the Ptinus fragilis and other insects which delight in such situations.’