Butterfly systematics has come a long waysince Linnaeus (1758) presented the first subdivision. It is remarkable that the subdivision into what we now call families has changed little since Latreille (1805), and the scheme given by Bates (1864), almost 150 years old now, looks remarkably modern (see de Jong et al., 1996). Since up to Wahlberg et al. (2005) most research on family level butterfly systematics was morphological and since the inclusion of molec-ular characters did not suggest radical changes for the time being,morphological characters were apparently a good guide to the phylogeny, at least at the family level. The more remarkable was the finding of Regier et al. (2009), Mutanen et al. (2010) and Heikkilä
et al. (2012) that there was molecular evidence for a radical change in our idea of butterfly relationships, Hesperiidae and
Hedylidae being sister groups, and Papilionoidea being non-monophyletic. Such a scheme was foreshadowed in the molecular tree based on Bayesian analysis in Wahlberg et al. (2005), but, as Mutanen et al. (2010) put it, “this result was obscured by morphological evidence”. Such a hypothesis is controversial as well as intriguing. However, we should not blame morphology for the late discovery, but take a new look at the morphology as well as at the molecules, since also the molecules can tell an incorrect story.The conflicting results from the large-scale, molecular-only studies of Regier et al. (2009) and Mutanen et al. (2010) clearly demon-strate that even “genomic size” datasets are not without conflicts.
Furthermore, the evidence from immature life stages in favor of a monophyletic Rhopalocera (including Hedylidae) found by Heikkilä et al. (2012) clearly demonstrates how careful studies of little used character sources (in this case the under-utilized immature life stages) can provide new evidence in support of one of several conflicting hypotheses