﻿An illustrated catalogue of the type specimens of Lepidoptera housed in the Zoological Museum Hamburg (ZMH): Part II. superfamily Papilionoidea

Reza Zahiri,Thure Dalsgaard,Matthias Seidel,Hossein Rajaei,Martin Husemann,Maryam Fatahi,Martin Wiemers,Vazrick Nazari

doi:10.3897/evolsyst.5.63435

Abstract

We provide an updated catalogue of the type material of the lepidopteran superfamily Papilionoidea deposited in the Zoological Museum of Hamburg (ZMH). We report 414 specimens labelled as “types” belonging to nine species (all of valid names), 74 subspecies (44 valid names and 30 synonyms), 59 invalid infrasubspecific names under the ICZN code, and 23 specimens of 16 “in litteris” (= unavailable) names. Out of the 414 specimens labelled as “types”, 171 specimens are primary types (8 holotypes/lectotypes and 163 syntypes) and 80 are secondary types; 120 specimens are infrasubspecific and hence invalid and are considered as “original specimens”; and 43 specimens are treated here as “Non-type” specimens (topotype). We present a full bibliography of the original descriptions and illustrations for all of these taxa, aiming to provide a comprehensive taxonomic guide to this collection.

Highlights

We provide an updated catalogue of the type material of the lepidopteran superfamily Papilionoidea deposited in the Zoological Museum of Hamburg (ZMH)
Natural history collections are the main archives of biodiversity
The last ZMH Lepidoptera catalogue was published by Herbert Weidner, a former curator of the collection, in 1974 (Weidner 1974)

Summary

Introduction

Natural history collections are the main archives of biodiversity. They focus on collecting, maintaining and documenting natural specimens, a crucial task, especially in times of global biodiversity decline (Dirzo et al 2014). With approximately five million specimens and several thousand primary types, the entomological collection is among the most important natural history archives in Germany. The collections are overall not well documented and updated type catalogues are largely lacking. We initiated a comprehensive effort to document all of the type material preserved in the ZMH in English language (Sartori et al 2016; Dey and Husemann 2018a, b; Harms and Dupérré 2018; Monod et al 2019; Henningsen et al 2020; Simoes et al 2021; Zahiri et al 2021). Reza Zahiri et al.: Lepidoptera type catalogue of Zoological Museum Hamburg: Papilionoidea burg (https://www.fundus.uni-hamburg.de/). Our first Lepidoptera catalogue (Zahiri et al 2021) on the superfamilies Hepialoidea, Cossoidea and Zygaenoidea has resulted in an updated list of 259 as “type” labelled specimens belonging to 13 valid species, 34 subspecies (16 valid and 18 invalid names), and 36 names of invalid infrasubspecific rank (based on the ICZN code)

Material and methods

Discussion