Rare Amazonian Butterfly named after Sir David Attenborough

A beautiful new black-eyed satyr species has become the first butterfly named in honour of Sir David Attenborough.

Attenborough's Blackeyed-Satyr (Credit: Andrew Neild, Natural History Museum, London)

Attenborough’s Blackeyed-Satyr (Credit: Andrew Neild, Natural History Museum, London)

Attenborough’s black-eyed satyr (Euptychia attenboroughi) is very rare. It is only found in the lowland tropical forests of the upper Amazon basin in Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil.

Sir David Attenborough with a morpho butterfly (Credit: Mark Carwardine/BBC)

Sir David Attenborough with a morpho butterfly (Credit: Mark Carwardine/BBC)

The beautiful black butterfly is not Sir David’s first animal namesake.

Attenborough’s moniker has been bestowed on a variety of plants and wildlife, including a flat lizard (Platysaurus attenboroughi), a grasshopper (Electrotettix attenboroughi), a pitcher plant (Nepenthes attenboroughii), a long-beaked echidna (Zaglossus attenboroughi) and even a dinosaur (Attenborosaurus conybeari).

Serra do Divisor National Park, Brazil (Credit: Diego R. Dolibaina)

The butterfly was identified by an international team of researchers led by Andrew Neild of the Natural History Museum in London, UK and Shinichi Nakahara of the University of Florida in Gainesville, US.

It has been described in the journal ZooKeys.

Reference

Suggested Reading

A Cordial invitation to Sir David Attenborough to be a Theist

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