Una hermosa idea
How to make a butterfly Jun 15th 2006 The Economist This butterfly is an example of a Central American species called Heliconius heurippa. Or, rather, it isn't, for it was bred in a laboratory by crossing two other species of Heliconius. As they report in Nature, Camilo Salazar of the University of the Andes, in Colombia, and Jesús Marávez, of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, in Panama, have shown experimentally that H. heurippa is a species formed by hybridisation in the wild. Two species have, in other words, merged into one, rather than one splitting into two, as usually happens during the course of evolution. H. heurippa does not crossbreed with its ancestors because species-specific wing markings signal that it does not belong to them. They thus avoid mating with it, so it is free to carry on evolving by itself.