A small blue butterfly has shown that the last Ice Age wiped out far less of the world's forests than previously thought, Italian researchers say.
Traces of the butterfly's DNA have been found all the way from western Europe to the Far East, far outside its previously believed range, according to Rome Tor Vergata University researchers Valerio Sbordoni and Paolo Gratton.
Working with Maciek Konopinski of the Polish Academy of Sciences, the Italian pair have produced a new map of the world's greenery during the Pleistocene Ice Age which froze the Earth from around 200,000 BC to 10,000 years ago.
"This butterfly only really flourishes in damp forest environments," Sbordoni told an international conference on butterfly biology outside Rome Wednesday.
"The evidence from the mitochondrial DNA strongly suggests that large patches of the world's forests survived the impact of the last Ice Age and were alive and well as far back as 150,000 years ago".
"There were definitely oases in which the Parnassius mnemosyne butterfly thrived, especially in the Carpathians and the ancient German region of Pannonia".
"It is one of the rare cases of such a large distribution of a butterfly species," he added.
"The mitochondrial DNA of this butterfly, genetic material inherited only through the mother, became a sort of 'molecular time machine' which enabled us to go back in time and find a single point of coalescence, the common ancestor of the butterfly group we studied".
