By Danielle Torrent When Charles Darwin journeyed to the
Galapagos Islands in the 1830s, he collected some mysterious
birds that later helped shape his theory of evolution by natural
selection. Dubbed “Darwin’s finches,” they became famous as an
example of adaptive radiation, in which animals evolve from a
common ancestor to utilize different ecological niches. Two
centuries later, on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, a
Florida Museum of Natural History researcher was attracted to a
group of insects he calls “Darwin’s butterflies,” because of
their similarly high degree of diversity derived from a common
ancestor. But it wasn’t until 20 years after beginning his
research on the genus Calisto as a University of Florida Ph.D.
student that Andrei Sourakov found the missing link for
understanding how the group should be classified. “DNA bar
coding was the perfect tool to look at this genus because a lot
of these species were separated based on only wing patterns, and
it’s difficult to prove whether these differ