A complete time-calibrated multi-gene phylogeny of the European butterflies
Martin Wiemers, Nicolas Chazot, Christopher W. Wheat, Oliver Schweiger, Niklas Wahlberg
Abstract
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.