The Field Museum’s Lepidoptera (butterfly and moth) collection contains some 200,000 specimens from all over the world, and is an important resource for scientists and scholars. Of the specimens in the Lepidoptera collection, about 90,000 are butterflies. Many of our specimens date from 1870 to the early 1900s.

The nucleus of the Museum’s Lepidoptera holdings is the Herman Strecker Collection. Most of the rest of The Field Museum’s butterfly and moth specimens have been donated by many different people over the years. Some also were added by Field Museum expeditions such as the 1929 Kelley-Roosevelt Expedition to China and Crane Expedition to New Guinea. The largest butterfly in the collection is a 9-inch African Giant Swallowtail (Papilio antimachus) from Gabon, and the smallest is a one-half-inch Pygmy Blue (Brephidium exile) from Utah.

Morpho Morpho cypris	Machaonides Swallowtail Heraclides machaonides
Colorado Hairstreak Hypaurotis crysalus	Viceroy Limenitis archippus