FUNDusCollection Portal of the University of Hamburg

Collection: Lepidoptera

The butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) belong to the holometabolous insects and are one of the most diverse insect groups with more than 180,000 described species. The butterfly collection was almost completely destroyed at the end of the Second World War and then rebuilt and today comprises about 1 million specimens and more than 2000 type specimens. The collection contains mostly pinned adult specimens, but also includes a number of pinned dry larvae and a larval alcohol collection. Most specimens are from the Palaearctic region with excellent species representation from Germany.The largest and most important collections which have been obtained being those of Georg Warnecke (1943 and 1963), Richard Jänig (1949), Fritz Diehl (1950–1972), Hermann Rödinger (1952), the Jungius Gesellschaft (1956), Hanan Bytinski-Salz (1960), Eduard Feldtmann (1960), Günter Albers (1972), the Altona Museum (1965, 1973, 1976), and Mathilde Linz (1974). More recently the largest newly obtained collections were those of Hans-Jürgen Kelm (2003), Walter Baltruweit (2013), Jörg Roloff (2014), Thomas Tischler (2017), Bernd Heinze (2020), and Karl-Heinz Müller-Köllges (2020). Most specimens are from the Palaearctic region with excellent species representation from Germany. The Nearctic, Afrotropics and Southeast Asia regions are also well represented. The types of the collection are currently documented in several catalogs (Zahiri et al. in prep.) and are presented here.