Sphingidae Taxonomic Inventory

Creating a taxonomic e-science

About us

You will find a comprehensive catalogue of the whole Sphingidae family, with pages for all species and subspecies. Many of these species and subspecies are illustrated and diagnoses provided to enable you to identify them with confidence.

This catalogue was originally created as part of CATE --Creating a Taxonomic E-science, which was a three-year project, funded by the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), with the goal of developing the technologies to put not only the products of taxonomic research onto the web, but also the process, involving the user community, to propose and review changes. One animal group (the Sphingidae) and one plant group (the arum lilies, Araceae) were selected to test the feasibility of the approach.

Following migration of the content from the CATE website to this scratchpad, there is much editing yet to be done, so please be patient as various elements are linked together and updated. If you do find an error that you consider needs to be fixed as a matter of urgency, then please contact the maintainer (I.Kitching@nhm.ac.uk).

Likewise, if you see a genus, species, subspecies or synonymy that has been overlooked, then please contact the maintainer, with a reference to the description or taxonomic act, and we will add pages as soon as possible.

Finally, please be aware that the classification, as represented by the taxon tree, reflects the current situation in the published literature. It should not be taken as an endorsement by the maintainer that he agrees with any particular taxonomic treatment. However, this will change as work is undertaken to clean up the more excessive splits and amalgamations so as to produce a more acceptable and biologically meaningful consensus classification for users.

Scratchpads developed and conceived by (alphabetical): Ed Baker, Katherine Bouton Alice Heaton Dimitris Koureas, Laurence Livermore, Dave Roberts, Simon Rycroft, Ben Scott, Vince Smith