Butterflies are perhaps the best studied higher group of invertebrate organisms and their systematics has been the subject of an immense body of studies for well over a century. Despite comprising only a few well-defined families (e.g. Ackery et al., 1999) and a relative low number of species for a mega-diverse group (18,771 species in 1815 genera, van Nieukerken et al., 2011, Fig.1), the group’s higher phylogeny (family and subfamily level) has proved to be remarkably hard to resolve. In the present paper a far from exhaustive account is given of the most influential and important contributions since the
middle of the last century, not only to show the progress in the study of butterfly systematics, but also to find where morphological and molecular evidence agree, and where they seem to be in conflict and what could be done about it.