Anchored phylogenomics illuminates the skipper butterfly tree of life

Butterflies (Papilionoidea) are perhaps the most charismatic insect lineage, yet phylogenetic relationships among them remain incompletely studied and controversial. We sequenced nearly 400 loci using Anchored Hybrid Enrichment and sampled all tribes and more than 120 genera of skippers (Hesperiidae), one of the most species-rich and poorly studied butterfly families. Maximum-likelihood, parsimony and coalescent multi-species methods all converged on a novel, robust phylogenetic hypothesis for skippers. Different optimality criteria and methodologies recovered almost identical phylogenetic trees with strong nodal support at nearly all taxonomic levels. Our results support Coeliadinae as the sister group to the remaining skippers, the monotypic Euschemoninae as sister group to all other subfamilies but Coeliadinae, and the monophyly of Eudaminae plus Pyrginae. Within Pyrginae, Celaenorrhinini and Tagiadini are sister groups, the Neotropical firetips, Pyrrhopygini, are sister to all other...