New Butterfly Identified at the NHM
The insect collections of museums contain drawers of unidentified specimens which await the attention of specialists. This month a new species of butterfly, Splendeuptychia ackeryi (Lepidoptera: Nymphalidae), will be published in Zootaxa after being discovered by a curator from The Natural History Museum, Blanca Huertas.
Huertas collected S. ackeryi during an expedition to Columbia, but it wasn’t until the unidentified butterfly was compared with a museum specimens that entomologist realised it was the same as a 90 year old unidentified museum specimen. One of the distinguishing features of S. ackeryi which helped with the identification were its extremely hairly mouthparts.
I first read about this in a ScienceDaily article.
You can view some photographs on the NHM news page.
Tags: butterflies, Lepidoptera, NHM, Nymphalidae, Splendeuptychia ackeryi, The Natural History Museum
