Chavan and Penev (2011) stated that “one of the effective strategies for addressing the growing biodiversity crisis is access to a range of biodiversity- and ecosystems-related data and information in a useful form to fill the extensive biodiversity knowledge gap that exists today”. The authors proposed “the biodiversity data paper as a mechanism to incentivize efforts and investment towards discovery and publishing of biodiversity data resources”.

Following their definition, a data paper is a journal publication whose primary purpose is to describe data, rather than to report a research investigation (Chavan and Penev 2011). As such, a data paper will contain facts about data but no hypotheses or arguments in support of hypotheses and theories based on data (Chavan and Penev 2011). Still according to these authors, the purposes of a data paper can be summarized in three: (1) provide a citable journal publication that brings credit to the data publisher, (2) describe the data in a structured and human-readable format and (3) to bring the existence of that data to the attention of the scientific community, and these three points are exactly what we wanted to do about the knowledge of immature beetles in Brazil.

The knowledge of the immature beetle’s diversity is still very incipient and the task of the Coleopterists to identify and determine beetles at this stages is enormous. Larvae and adults of Coleoptera possess a mix of dependent and independent adaptations that reflect a complex evolution. Taxonomic and phylogenetic analyses that involves characters of larvae and adults could offer a wider vision of the evolutionary process.

Besides the taxonomic and systematic perspective, the study of the whole life cycle of Coleoptera is very important for the economic, environment and medical perspectives, especially because many immatures of beetles are responsible for considerable financial losses in crops, trees and other aspects that impact on peoples lives.

In this paper, an online dataset of the immatures of Coleoptera described from Brazil is provided for the first time. In this dataset, for each species, information about the amount of specimens studied, development time, localities, host plants and other relevant information is given.

From the literature consulted the specimens were collected in many habitats, that are summarized below. The precise information on each specimen, when provided, is on the dataset.

• Specimens were originally found in wooden floors inside residences, under decaying wood of different kinds of trees, in pasture fields, inside holes in the grass or inside galleries of dead trunks and bounds, in litter and on beach and at night walking in arenous railroad.
• In aquatic environments specimens were found in streams of water close to rocks, in aquatic rocky wall, temporary pounds and lagoons.
• Associated with other Insects, Arthropods and mammals and birds and their excrements the specimens were found in subterranean nest of Geotrigona sp. (Apidae, Meliponinae), in dead bodies of rats, chicken and hedgehog; in epigeum nests Isoptera of Anoplotermes, Microcerotermes sp., Nasutitermes and Cornitermes sp., in excrements of bird, equines, bovines and swine, preying on Homoptera, Psyllidae and inside Mantidae ootheca.
• Associated with vegetables and fungi immatures were found in hard trunks of Lauraceae, probably of Nectranda or Ocotea, in bromeliads with vegetal detritus, in the axil of leaves, sugar cane plantation, in Casuarina sp. and in dried cut bamboos as well as inside many fruits and leaves of several families of plants and associated with fungi.

We thank the SiBBr (Sistema de Informação Sobre a Biodiversidade Brasileira) team by their help and assistance with the edition of data, specially to Danny Vélez, Rafael Fonseca, David Valentim, Eduardo Rudas and Clara Baringo; the team of the Museu de Zooologia library, specially Dione Seripieri and Viviane Neves for providing the missing literature; Thamires Gonçalves for her assistance with data analysis; Sérgio A. Vanin (Instituto de Biociências, Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil) for reading a previous version of the manuscript of this paper; to Charles J. Hart and Frank E. Etzler (MTEC) for the English review and other suggestions of a previous version of this manuscript. VSF is very grateful to Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) of Brazil for the PhD scholarship (process 202559/2015-7). Cleide Costa is very grateful to CNPq for her awarded Research Grant (Pq-Sr).

Vinicius S. Ferreira was responsible by the design of the work, the data collection, data analysis, drafting the article, critical revision of the article and final approval of the version to be published.

Cleide Costa was responsible by the design of the work, drafting the article, critical revision of the article and final approval of the version to be published.