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 pre-viously. 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.
CITATION STYLE
Wiemers, M., Chazot, N., Wheat, C. W., Schweiger, O., & Wahlberg, N. (2020). A complete time-calibrated multi-gene phylogeny of the european butterflies. ZooKeys, 2020(938), 97–124. https://doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.938.50878
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