[PDF] Nymphalid butterflies diversify following near demise at the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary | Semantic Scholar (2024)

It is argued that the characteristics of the evolutionary history of Erebia are consistent with a density-dependent scenario, with species radiation limited by filling of niche space and reduced resources, which implies an early rapid diversification followed by deceleration due to a decrease in speciation.

An analysis of the evolution of larval–foodplant associations shows that although monophagous Violaceae-feeding is the original feeding strategy within Boloria, numerous host-shifts or broadenings of diet have happened, and inherent plasticity in host choice has likely been an important factor in the diversification in alpine and arctic environments by Boloria.

The results suggest that the butterflies, as traditionally understood, are paraphyletic, with Papilionidae being the sister-group to Hesperioidea, Hedyloidea and all other butterflies, and the families in the current three superfamilies should be placed in a single superfamily PapilionoideA.

The biogeographic history indicates that temperature changes and host-plant diversification may have facilitated the dispersals of this butterfly subfamily, with accelerated global colonization during the middle to late Miocene.

This study re-describes and provides a phylogeny for the Brassolini genus Blepolenis, which includes three species from the Brazilian Atlantic forest, and discusses the repeated loss of male wing androconial organs within BlePolenis.

Relaxed clock-based crown age estimates for clades of Neotropical butterflies from 6 families, as well as age Estimates for more than 400 pairs of sister species included in 102 genera are compiled.

The biogeography of Vanessa suggests that species vagility and allopatry do not fully explain the forces governing cladogenesis in this remarkable genus, suggesting long‐term isolation and stability of many extant species and, by extension, ancestral species.

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It is suggested that the adaptive radiation of grass feeders in Satyrini has been facilitated by the ubiquitousness of grasses since 25 Myr ago, which was triggered by a change in global climate.

A cladistic analysis was performed on a 378 bp region of the wingless gene from 103 nymphalid species and three pierid outgroups to suggest that this short gene region provides a useful source of data for phylogenetic inference, provided that adequate effort is made to sample a diversity of taxa.

It is emphasized that, when employed with caveats, major palaeoenvironmental events could represent very powerful tools for the calibration of the dating of divergences using molecular data.

It is concluded that the most likely origin of extant members of Coenonympha was in the Central Asian mountains, and the tullia, glycerion and hero groups started diverging in Europe following dispersal into the region.

Using recent advances in plant and butterfly systematics to trace the evolution of host-plant utilization in the butterfly subfamily Nymphalinae, a clear historical pattern emerges, with an ancestral host- plant theme of 'urticalean rosids' and two major colonizations of novel distantly-related plant clades.

A dispersal-vicariance analysis suggests that dispersal has had a major effect on the distributions of extant species, and three biotic regions are identified as being centres of diversification of three major clades: the Palaearctic for the Nymphalis -group, the Afrotropics for Junoniini and the Nearctic for Melitaeini.

The first phylogenetic hypothesis of Libytheinae is presented utilizing all available morphological data from extant and extinct species and highlights the contribution that can be made by scoring extinct taxa and including them directly into the analysis.

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