American Snout

Here's an American Snout I met a few years back. A few days ago I talked about a lepidopteran with a similar name (Baltimore Snout) so I figured the American Snout for Throwback Thursday.

Unlike the Baltimore Snout, the American Snout is a butterfly. Thus every single butterfly species is more closely related to the American Snout than the Baltimore Snout is. Still, butterflies and moths (aka lepidopterans) are pretty similar (and related) types of insects, and both these lepidopterans can have labial palps that look to us like a big, long nose.

Whether the American Snout is also a moth is kind of a philosophical taxonomic question. Some people knowledgeable about insects consider butterflies to be a type of moth, very similar to the way mathematicians consider a square to be a type of rectangle. These people presumably consider the terms "moth" and "lepidopteran" to be synonymous.

Others basically look at butterflies and moths as separate groups, where butterflies are a monophyletic group within the lepidopterans and moths are a paraphyletic group consisting of all lepidopterans that are not butterflies.

June 15, 2019 at the John Clyde Native Grassland Preserve
Photo 42064187, (c) jpviolette, some rights reserved (CC BY-NC)


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