Rare fossils reveal the butterfly 'tree of life' over the past 100 million years

The research is a first step in a larger project concerning butterfly species, and it can act as a resource for future studies, said lead study author Akito Kawahara, curator of lepidoptera at the Florida Museum of Natural History.

The fossil specimens provided the researchers with genetic mile markers, helping them determine when critical events happened in butterfly evolution. When butterflies first appeared in Central America and western North America, a vast seaway divided North America into two regions. North and South America were also separated by the sea, and Mexico, the US, Canada and Russia were all joined together by land.

The researchers were also surprised to find that butterflies reached Australia, which was still attached to Antarctica when the insects appeared there. Given that Antarctica was once a warmer environment millions of years ago due to hotter global temperatures, it’s likely that butterflies once lived there and crossed into Australia before it separated into its own continent.

The database, now available to the public, is the result of translated and transcribed information from books, web pages and museum collections.Most of the modern butterfly families were already around about 66 million years ago when dinosaurs went extinct due to an asteroid strike.

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