Phylogenies are important to understand the relationship between major groups of species and the possible evolution pathways for several characters. Many authors have contributed to study butterfly phylogenies at different levels, adding small and large bits of knowledge to our current understanding of the position of this group among the Lepidoptera.
The Tree of Life (ToL) has an interesting collection of information about many organisms in the world, pages for species and higher taxa are linked one to another hierarchically, in the form of the evolutionary tree of life. Data on butterflies has been contributed by several authors, including Andrew V. Z. Brower, Niklas Wahlberg, Andrew Warren and others. The project began populating the pages around 2003, and the text contents for larger groups was generated around 2008, but many genus/species pages are updated regularly, including recent (2011/2012) publications. However the group is still treated as three major superfamilies.
The Leptree project provided a more dynamic interface to the phylogeny of lepidoptera. Its goals include: to resolve deep relationships among lepidopteran groups using nuclear protein-coding genes, to characterize the known lepidopteran fossil record, to reconcile morphological terminology used across superfamilies, and to study innovative uses of grid computing, social, and semantic technologie. Unfortunately, this link appears to be broken (March 2013).