Lepidópteros e o mito platónico

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(daqui)

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"In his autobiography Speak, Memory, the writer and lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov described a beautiful gynandromorph butterfly — male on one side, female on the other — that he had caught as a youth on his family’s Russian estate. Sadly, the butterfly was crushed when his stout Swiss governess sat upon his tray of specimens, leaving only a “headless thorax on its bent pin.” The image of an intact gynandromorph at [the top] — the more brilliant blue left side is the male half — is included in the magnificently strange book Rarest of the Rare, a sampling of curious artifacts from the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Among the rich finds: a fossil sand dollar that Charles Darwin picked up in Patagonia in 1834, during his voyage on the Beagle; an exquisite coiled boa constrictor skeleton, 300 vertebrae long; and Nabokov’s wooden cabinet of butterfly genitalia, the study of which enabled him to name seven new genera of Latin American blues."

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