Old growth forests are essential for biodiversity conservation, but they’re becoming very rare, scattered and threatened throughout Europe. Old growth forest is a concept with many dimensions such as naturalness, stand maturity, native tree species and strictly associated biodiversity. Some stenotopic, flight less and rare saproxylic beetles allow us to evaluate historical forest continuity. However the saproxylic beetles species included in the Natura 2000 appendix are not the most relevant indicators for hot spot detection. We provide examples of saproxylic hot spots from France, Central Europe, Scandinavia and Macaronesia.