A bright red splash on a butterfly’s wing is more than a pretty pattern. It is a warning label, honed by millions of years of ...

Heliconius charithonia is one of the species of butterflies whose wing patterns scientists scrutinized to better understand the evolutionary process. This butterfly is wild-type; the genetically ...

Red may mean STOP or I LOVE YOU! A red splash on a toxic butterfly's wing screams DON'T EAT ME! In nature, one toxic butterfly species may mimic the wing pattern of another toxic species in the area.

The genes that make a fruit fly's eyes red also produce red wing patterns in the Heliconius butterfly found in South and Central America, finds entomologists. The genes that make a fruit fly’s eyes ...

Amazonian Heliconius butterflies have a distinctive coloring, known as the “dennis red patch” and the “ray red streaks” on each side of the wing. These colors come from different genes that derived ...

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The beautiful patterns on butterfly wings are emerging as exceptional model systems that may reveal much about how the shapes, sizes and colors of specific organisms have evolved, a ...

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready... Engineered mutant butterflies give a glimpse deep into the genetic roots of wing patterns, an international team reported Monday in the Proceedings of the ...

Butterfly wing patterns have a basic plan to them, which is manipulated by non-coding regulatory DNA to create the diversity of wings seen in different species, according to new research. The study, ...

An international team of scientists working with Heliconius butterflies in Panama was faced with a mystery: how do pairs of unrelated butterflies from Peru to Costa Rica evolve nearly the same ...