Ambassador of entomology, bastion of butterflies

Charles Remington was born curious. The son of Principia’s assistant headmaster, he relished childhood butterfly collecting with his father.

That pastime became a lifelong passion, inspiring new insights into evolutionary biology and bringing him renown as the “father of modern lepidoptery.”

Remington befriended a young Vladimir Nabokov while earning his PhD at Harvard, and went on to teach at Yale for 44 years. As the Curator of Entomology at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History, he amassed the world’s largest but- terfly collection—over a million species, including the Agathymus remingtoni and Metajapyx remingtoni, named in his honor and pictured above. His tireless inquiry led to his theory of “suture zones,” an important addition to Darwin’s theory of evolution, but in 1996, his fascination with locusts finally made him famous.