Butterfly Taxonomy

The taxonomy of butterflies (their classification), with species from the British Isles listed, is given in the table below. This table has been derived from a number of sources and, unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a universal agreement on a single taxonomy. The taxonomy shown here is taken from Fauna Europaea. Other useful information sources include The Lepidoptera Taxome Project at University College London, The Natural History Museum LepIndex, Markku Savela's FUNet project, "The Illustrated Encyclopedia of the Butterfly World" by Paul Smart, and The Moths and Butterflies of Great Britain and Ireland Volume 7 (1) Hesperiidae to Nymphalidae (the Butterflies). My sincere thanks to Adrian Hoskins for giving me various pointers as this page was put together.

The taxonomic structure follows the sequence Kingdom -> Subkingdom -> Phylum -> Subphylum -> Class -> Order -> Superfamily -> Family -> Subfamily -> Tribe -> Genus -> Subgenus -> Species -> Subspecies. The following table is preceded by the following additional taxonomic information related to butterflies:

Kingdom: Animalia
Subkingdom: Eumetazoa
Phylum: Arthropoda
Subphylum: Hexapoda
Class: Insecta
Order: Lepidoptera

The column labelled "forms" lists any forms associated with the species. The column labelled "B & F" refers to the Bradley and Fletcher log book number. The more primitive species are listed first.