Hedylidae

Hedylidae, the "American moth-butterflies", is a family of insects in the lepidopteran order, representing the superfamily Hedyloidea. They have traditionally been viewed as an extant sister group of the butterfly superfamilies Papilionoidea and Hesperioidea. In 1986, Scoble combined all species into a single genus Macrosoma, comprising 35 currently recognized and entirely Neotropical species, as a novel concept of butterflies.

Taxonomy and systematics

Hedylidae were previously treated as a tribe of Geometridae: Oenochrominae, the "Hedylicae" Prout considered they might even merit treatment as their own family. Scoble first considered them to be a hitherto unrecognised group of butterflies and also suggested Hedylidae might possibly constitute the sister group of the "true" butterflies (Papilionoidea), rather than of (Hesperioidea + Papilionoidea). Weintraub and Miller argued against this placement (but see). In 1995, Weller and Pashley found that molecular data did indeed place Hedylidae with the butterflies and a more comprehensive study in 2005 based on 57 exemplar taxa, three genes and 99 morphological characters, recovered the genus Macrosoma as sister to the ("true butterflies" + "skippers"). However, the most recent phylogenetic analyses suggest that both skippers and hedylids are true butterflies belonging within the clade Papilionoidea, as without these two groups the traditionally circumscribed Papilionoidea is paraphyletic.