Timochares ruptifasciata runia Evans, 1953

Zhang, Jing, Cong, Qian, Shen, Jinhui, Song, Leina & Grishin, Nick V., 2024, New taxa of butterflies supported by genomic analysis, The Taxonomic Report of the International Lepidoptera Survey 12 (3), pp. 1-63 : 39

Timochares ruptifasciata runia Evans, 1953 is a new junior subjective synonym of Timochares ruptifasciata ( Plötz, 1884)

Before Evans (1953), all populations of Timochares ruptifasciata ( Plötz, 1884) (type locality in Jamaica, see above) were treated under this name. Evans (1953) was the first to divide T. ruptifasciata into subspecies. However, he did not have access to the type material and apparently overlooked the illustration of T. ruptifasciata in Draudt (1923) (reproduced here as Fig. 41b), which agrees better with the Jamaican populations than continental populations. Due to these oversights, instead of proposing a new name for the continental populations, Evans described Jamaican specimens as a new subspecies, thus misidentifying Timochares ruptifasciata because he assumed that this name referred to the continental subspecies. Both wing pattern and genomic analysis of the T. ruptifasciata lectotype designated above place it with Jamaican specimens. Therefore, we propose that Timochares ruptifasciata runia Evans, 1953 , syn. nov. is a junior subjective synonym of Timochares ruptifasciata ( Plötz, 1884) . As a result, continental populations remain without an available name. Moreover, Austin and Warren (2002) argued that Jamaican populations (referred to by the name T. runia ) and continental populations (referred to by the name T. ruptifasciata ) are distinct at the species level, and our genomic analysis agrees with this conclusion ( Fig. 40), e.g., their COI barcodes differ by 3.6% (24 bp). For all these reasons, continental populations of T. ruptifasciata constitute a new species described below.