Phylogenomics provides strong evidence for relationships of butterflies and moths

Butterflies and moths constitute some of the most popular and charismatic insects. Lepidoptera includes approximately 160,000 described species, many of which are important model organisms. Previous studies on the evolution of Lepidoptera did not confidently place butterflies. We generated a molecular dataset of 46 taxa, combining 33 new transcriptomes with 13 available genomes, transcriptomes, and ESTs. We identified 2,696 genes for inclusion into the phylogenic analysis using HaMStR and a Lepidoptera specific core ortholog set of single-copy genes. We present the first robust tree that strongly contradicts the placement of butterflies, and provide an evolutionary framework for genomic, developmental and ecological studies on this diverse insect order.