like from a scrap book, no?
Location: Misiones/Argentina (Iguacu national park)
January 19, 2012 12:56 pm
This is a beautiful butterfly I was able to get a shot in Iguacu, Argentina. It was 2 inch or so. Did not find it’s name on the net. Can you help?
Signature: Jutta
Dear Jutta,
This butterfly is positively stunning. We had hoped it would not be too difficult to identify, and we started by doing a word search of “clearwing swallowtail (though we knew it was not Papilionidae) Peru (we read your location too quickly)” and after scouring many photos, we found a close but not perfect match FlickR that was called a Swordtail, but no species name. Then we substituted Swordtail for Swallowtail and we found Morton Ross’ website and a lovely photo identified as the Octauius Swordtail, Chorinea octauius. Armed with a scientific name, we found no shortage of images of this beauty on the internet, including some photos from Panama on the Neotropical Butterflies website, though we were still not sure of the family classification. Though we don’t like to cite Wikipedia as a source, it was Wikipedia that provided the family name Riodinidae, and we have created a new subcategory for Swordtails on our site. Thanks for providing us with a challenging identification. We did locate another member from the family in our archives so your beauty will not be classified alone. We also learned that the family is commonly called Metalmarks.