Roughly 100 million years ago, a pioneering group of moths began to venture out during the day instead of night, seizing the opportunity presented by flowers abundant in nectar that had evolved alongside bees. This single event sparked the evolution of the entire butterfly species. Since 2019, th
Using the largest butterfly tree of life ever created, scientists have determined where the first butterflies originated and which plants they relied on for food. Credit: Florida Museum photo by Kristen Grace and phylogeny by Hillis, Zwickl, and Gutell
Before 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. 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.
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. Butterflies first appeared somewhere in Central and western North America. 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. North and South America hadn’t yet joined via the Isthmus of Panama, but butterflies had little difficulty crossing the strait between them.
Farther north, butterflies lingered on the edge of western Asia for potentially up to 45 million years before finally migrating into Europe. The reason for this extended pause is unclear, but its effects are still apparent today, Kawahara explained. “We looked at this association over an evolutionary timescale, and in pretty much every family of butterflies, bean plants came out to be the ancestral hosts,” Kawahara said. “This was true in the ancestor of all butterflies as well.”
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