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Butterflies and Moths of the World

There are currently an estimated 112,000 to 165,000 described species of butterflies and moths (Scoble, 1999) in nearly 24,000 available and objective replacement genus-group names within 126 families. As of January 2013 this online catalogue comprises more than 32,000 entries and includes all published genus-group names (including available names, objective or subjective replacement names, junior homonyms, junior synonyms, unnecessary replacement names, misspellings, incorrect citations and suppressed, unknown, unavailable, invalid and rejected names) from Linnaeus, 1758, up to Zoological Record, March, 2000 plus additional names from Gerado Lamas (2008) and Gilligan et al. (2010).

Families, subfamilies, tribes and subtribes where relevant, authors, publication dates, references, type-species, type-species designations, type specimen data, synonymy and comments. The references have been standardised as far as possible throughout.

Over 400 full colour images, representing most of the families and subfamilies have also been included. Most images are taken from The Natural History Museum's extensive collections, but some images of live Spanish butterflies have recently been added.

Data and Resources

Cite this as

Natural History Museum; Brian Pitkin; Paul Jenkins (2023). Butterflies and Moths of the World [Data set]. Natural History Museum. https://doi.org/10.5519/s93616qw
Retrieved: 01:32 11 Nov 2024 (UTC) BibTeX

Additional Info

Field Value
Primary contributors
Natural History Museum ( 039zvsn29);
Pitkin, Brian;
Jenkins, Paul
Other contributors
Temporal extent 1967 - 2014
Update frequency Discontinued
Last updated 16 March 2023
Last resource update 16 March 2023 (Supplementary Material 3b - Classification.xlsx)
Created 17 February 2023
License Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike