Florida Museum of Natural History
Key points
- Scientists have published a broad review of what they've learned about moths and butterflies over the last few decades.
- Special attention is given to pivotal moments during the ~300 million-year history of the group. These include changes in diet that moths achieved, in part, by purloining genetic material from bacteria and fungi; the evolution of the proboscis and early forms of pollination; the origin of flowers and the first butterflies; the origin of bats and the strategies moths used to evade them; and the alarming decline of moth and butterfly diversity caused by human activity.
- Many new discoveries have been made by studying genomes, aided by large scientific initiatives like Project Psyche, which is in the process of sequencing the genomes of all moth and butterfly species in Europe, and the overarching Earth Biogenome Project with its ambitious goal to sequence all 1.8 million known eukaryotic species on Earth.
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