Beetles

Beetles are little bugs with a thick carapace on their backs, which affords them some protection from other predators, but also makes them really easy to flick across the kitchen floor. In truth, this carapace is actually a bisected covering for their wings, which spreads open and allows them to fly. Much harder to flick that way.

In the "Scarab" episode of Land of the Lost, that stupid little Pakuni kid Cha-Ka was messing with a beetle and was bitten. This strange alien creature had an infectious bite that brought out one's most negative traits. As a result, Cha-Ka became a total dick and began causing problems, such as vandalizing everything in the Marshall family's temple sanctuary, to baiting Will Marshall into a trap, and luring others into the path of Grumpy the Tyrannosaur.

On the Showtime television series Penny Dreadful, Ferdinand Lyle of the British Museum used carrion beetles to eat the flesh off of some human remains, leaving the skull and bones intact. Lyle's breed of carrion beetles originated from Suffolk. Vanessa Ives took a great interest in them, and she later made use of such carrion beetles to strip the outer carapace of a dead vampire, so that she, Sir Malcolm Murray and Doctor Victor Frankenstein could inspect the body underneath.