How many species of butterflies are there?
The best count I was able to find is about 24,000 different species. Moths have many more, around 140,000 species. Where did they get the name “butterfly” from? Now you would think there would be a very clear and direct answer for this simple question! Surprisingly, I found different “guesses” as to where the term “butterfly” came from. One source claims they use to fly around the farmenrs when they were churning butter, and therefore were called “butter flys” Some believe it is based on the yellow color of many common butterflies, while others claim that people believed that butterflies were actually witches or fairies that came into the house at night and stole butter. The scientific name for “butterfly” is “Lepidoptera” which means “scaly wings”.
