This Butterfly Was the First in North America That People Made Extinct
New research suggests the iconic Xerces blue butterfly may have been its own species.
The 93-year-old Xerces blue butterfly specimen, located in the collections of the Field Museum in Chicago, used in the study.Credit...The Field Museum
July 21, 2021
More than a century ago, a bluish butterfly flitted among the sand dunes of the Sunset District in San Francisco and laid its eggs on a plant known as deerweed. As the city’s development overtook the dunes and deerweed, the butterflies vanished, too. The last Xerces blue butterfly was collected in 1941 from Lobos Creek by an entomologist who would later lament that he had killed what was one of the last living members of the species.