This family, the true swallowtails, has probably been the subject of more phylogenetic scrutiny than any comparable group
of insects (Vane-Wright, 2003). It has been the focus of numerous molecular studies from the single-gene humble beginnings of molecular systematics in the 1990s to recent total evidence studies based on multiple genes and numerous morphological characters (see Simonsen et al., 2011 for a review). As such the recent history of phylogenetic studies of Papilionidae is almost a mini picture of the development of molecular and total evidence studies of insects.