Neominois Scudder, 1875

Zhang, Jing, Cong, Qian, Shen, Jinhui, Opler, Paul A. & Grishin, Nick V., 2019, Changes to North American butterfly names, The Taxonomic Report of the International Lepidoptera Survey 8 (2), pp. 1-12 : 5

Neominois Scudder, 1875 is a subgenus of Oeneis Hübner, [1819]

In agreement with the previous study (Kleckova et al. 2015), we find that Neominois Scudder, 1875 (type species Satyrus ridingsii W. H. Edwards, 1865) originates within Oeneis Hübner, [1819] (type species Papilio norna Thunberg, 1791, represented by O. polixenes (Fabricius, 1775) in the US) as it is currently defined, and is sister to the subgenus Oeneis. COI barcode difference between ridingsii and polixenes is only 6.2%. However, subgenus Protoeneis Gorbunov, 2001 (type species Chionobas nanna Ménétriés, 1858, represented by Oeneis uhleri (Reakirt, 1866) in the US fauna) that is placed in the genus Oeneis, is a sister to the clade consisting of Neominois and subgenus Oeneis (Fig. 6). The entire group of 3 taxa is compact (Fig. 6), prominent, and genetic divergence within it agrees with the expected divergence within a genus. Therefore, we treat Neominois as a subgenus of Oeneis.