black swallowtail butterfly
shutterstock/katherines
Butterflies first fluttered in North America about 100 million years ago, according to genetic analysis. The findings will be used to create a detailed family tree of butterflies, giving scientists new insights into the evolutionary origins of butterflies and how they spread around the world.
“Surprisingly, the family relationships and history of butterflies are largely unknown,” says Akito Kawahara of the University of Florida.
A previous small-scale project had attempted to pinpoint the earliest ancestors of insects, says Kawahara. I had the hypothesis that…
