Meeting Abstract
Butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) are a mega-diverse order of insects with nearly 160,000 described species. They are ecologically important as pollinators, are often pests to agriculture, serve as models for many different scientific disciplines, and are key indicators of environmental change, but a robust phylogenetic framework for the order is lacking. Here we present the first comprehensive, dated evolutionary tree of butterflies and moths, which was constructed based on a dataset of 2380 orthologous loci and 25 non-redundant, carefully assessed fossils. Our results show that the origin of Lepidoptera is ~295.6 ± 17.3 Ma, considerably older than previously believed. We analyzed the dataset using different datasets and dating schemes, our results conclusively show that the majority of lepidopteran lineages diversified in the Cretaceous. We test correlations to two central co-evolutionary hypotheses, the postulated synchronized timing of Lepidoptera with angiosperms and the postulate that moth ultrasonic hearing organs originated in response to bats, in the early Paleogene. Our results reveal that angiosperm-feeding lepidopteran lineages may have originated largely in synchrony with the earliest flowering plants, but the evolution of hearing organs in Lepidoptera predates the origin of insectivorous bats. The early rise in hearing organs suggest that these morphological structures had a different function in the Cretaceous and were only later co-opted as an anti-bat strategy during the Paleogene.
