Heliconius charithonia is one of the species of butterflies whose wing patterns scientists scrutinized to better understand the evolutionary process. This butterfly is wild-type; the genetically ...

In the early 1990s, Keith Willmott and a friend, both undergraduate students from the United Kingdom, arrived in Ecuador with ...

Butterflies closer to the equator have been shown to evolve shared wing patterns faster than their relatives at higher latitudes. That gradient reframes tropical diversity as an active process, shaped ...

Many butterflies develop wing patterns that mimic other species to protect themselves from predators. While growing complex body parts like wings involves many genes, the difference between two ...

Butterfly wing patterns have a basic plan to them, which is manipulated by non-coding regulatory DNA to create the diversity of wings seen in different species, according to new research. The study, ...

The beautiful patterns on butterfly wings are emerging as exceptional model systems that may reveal much about how the shapes, sizes and colors of specific organisms have evolved, a type of study ...

An international team of scientists working with Heliconius butterflies in Panama was faced with a mystery: how do pairs of unrelated butterflies from Peru to Costa Rica evolve nearly the same ...

Butterfly wings have been given make-overs by scientists who tweaked a “painting gene” to change their patterns and colours. The research has major implications for understanding how the so-called ...