Butterflies are a diverse and charismatic insect group that are thought to have evolved with plants and dispersed throughout the world in response to key geological events. However, these hypotheses have not been extensively tested because a comprehensive phylogenetic framework and datasets for butterfly larval hosts and global distributions are lacking. We sequenced 391 genes from nearly 2,300 butterfly species, sampled from 90 countries and 28 specimen collections, to reconstruct a new phylogenomic tree of butterflies representing 92% of all genera. Our phylogeny has strong support for nearly all nodes and demonstrates that at least 36 butterfly tribes require reclassification. Divergence time analyses imply an origin ~100 million years ago for butterflies and indicate that all but one family were present before the K/Pg extinction event. We aggregated larval host datasets and global distribution records and found that butterflies are likely to have first fed on Fabaceae and originated in what is now the Americas. Soon after the Cretaceous Thermal Maximum, butterflies crossed Beringia and diversified in the Palaeotropics. Our results also reveal that most butterfly species are specialists that feed on only one larval host plant family. However, generalist butterflies that consume two or more plant families usually feed on closely related plants.

A field survey of Mount Cameroon, South-West Province, Cameroon, revealed two butterfly species new to science. Lepidochrysops liberti sp. nov. (Lycaenidae) flies in the extensive mosaic of natural clearings in sub-montane forest above 1100 m a.s.l., whereas Ceratrichia fako sp. nov. (Hesperiidae) locally inhabits the forested narrow gullies in the same vegetation zone. Observations on the habitat and behaviour of both species are also presented.

Amerila is one of the most studied Afrotropical genera of Arctiinae. However, based on a regionally constrained sample of specimens from Mount Cameroon, we show how superficial our knowledge on these tiger moths is. Among six collected Amerila species, A. femina’s female is described here for the first time, and A. mulleri and A. roseomarginata had never been recorded before in the country. Moreover, novel biological data are presented, including individual species’ elevational ranges. Finally, female reproductive organs of the genus are illustrated here for the first time. The value of such regional studies is highlighted, with some remarks on necessary requirements of such small-scaled field sampling.

During extensive field work in West Africa (Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone), the authors collected two skipper species in the genus Andronymus (Lepidoptera, Hesperiidae), which would not fit the descriptions of any existing taxa. Both are described as new, A. magma sp. nov. is known only from Cameroon, while A. fenestra sp. nov. was found in a few localities in the Liberian sub-region of West Africa.

The cossid or the Carpenter Moths (Lepidoptera, Cossidae) include about 1000 species worldwide (van Nieukerken et al., 2011), of which 750 species belong to five subfamilies that occur in the Old World (Yakovlev 2011). The Cossidae are still relatively poorly known from vast areas of the African continent, despite recent reports on the fauna of Malawi (Yakovlev & Murphey 2014), Zimbabwe (Yakovlev & Lenz 2014), and Zambia (Yakovlev 2014). The first results of an ongoing revision of the South African Cossidae have also been published (Mey 2015).