![]() ![]() They even made it to India, which was then an isolated island, separated by miles of open sea on all sides.Įven more astonishing was their arrival in Australia, which remained sutured to Antarctica, the last combined remnant of the supercontinent Pangaea. From there, they quickly covered ground, radiating into Southeast Asia, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa. North and South America hadn't yet joined via the Isthmus of Panama, but butterflies had little difficulty crossing the strait between them.ĭespite the relatively close proximity of South America to Africa, butterflies took the long way around, moving into Asia across the Bering Land Bridge. At the time, North America was bisected by an expansive seaway that split the continent in two, while present-day Mexico was joined in a long arc with the United States, Canada and Russia. Some groups traveled over impossibly vast distances while others seem to have stayed in one place, remaining stationary while continents, mountains and rivers moved around them.īutterflies first appeared somewhere in Central and western North America. The results tell a dynamic story - one rife with rapid diversifications, faltering advances and improbable dispersals. The few that are can be used as calibration points on genetic trees, allowing researchers to record timing of key evolutionary events. With paper-thin wings and threadlike, gossamer hairs, butterflies are rarely preserved in the fossil record. Underlying all these data were 11 rare butterfly fossils, without which the analysis would not have been possible. Undeterred, the authors decided to make their own, publicly available database, painstakingly translating and transferring the contents of books, museum collections and isolated web pages into a single digital repository. "In many cases, the information we needed existed in field guides that hadn't been digitized and were written in various languages," Kawahara said. Prior to this study, there was no single place that researchers could go to access that type of data. ![]() There are some 19,000 butterfly species, and piecing together the 100 million-year history of the group required information about their modern distributions and host plants. It's also the most difficult study I've ever been a part of, and it took a massive effort from people all over the world to complete." "It's something I've wanted to do since visiting the American Museum of Natural History when I was a kid and seeing a picture of a butterfly phylogeny taped to a curator's door. "This was a childhood dream of mine," he said. According to their results, published this Monday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, this is where the first butterflies took flight.įor lead author Akito Kawahara, curator of lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History, the project was a long time coming. Using this framework as a guide, they traced the movements and feeding habits of butterflies through time in a four-dimensional puzzle that led back to North and Central America. Now, scientists have discovered where the first butterflies originated and which plants they relied on for food.īefore reaching these conclusions, researchers from dozens of countries had to create the world's largest butterfly tree of life, assembled with DNA from more than 2,000 species representing all butterfly families and 92% of genera. Scientists have known the precise timing of this event since 2019, when a large-scale analysis of DNA discounted an earlier hypothesis that pressure from bats prompted the evolution of butterflies after the extinction of dinosaurs. ![]()
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