A complete time-calibrated multi-gene phylogeny of the European butterflies

• Main Authors: Martin Wiemers, Nicolas Chazot, Christopher W. Wheat, Oliver Schweiger, Niklas Wahlberg
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Pensoft Publishers 2020-06-01
• Series: ZooKeys
• Online Access: https://zookeys.pensoft.net/article/50878/download/pdf/

With the aim of supporting ecological analyses in butterflies, the third most species-rich superfamily of Lepidoptera, this paper presents the first time-calibrated phylogeny of all 496 extant butterfly species in Europe, including 18 very localised endemics for which no public DNA sequences had been available previously. It is based on a concatenated alignment of the mitochondrial gene COI and up to eleven nuclear gene fragments, using Bayesian inferences of phylogeny. To avoid analytical biases that could result from our region-focussed sampling, our European tree was grafted upon a global genus-level backbone butterfly phylogeny for analyses. In addition to a consensus tree, the posterior distribution of trees and the fully concatenated alignment are provided for future analyses. Altogether a complete phylogenetic framework of European butterflies for use by the ecological and evolutionary communities is presented.