Fantastic palette of nature on the wings of butterflies: silver, gold, ruby, turquoise, emerald, blue sapphire and many other colours

Abstract

In the course of the past 100 million years, nature has formed diverse colours, forms and structures that resemble one another and/or repeat themselves in animate and inanimate nature. Thus many butterfly wings have the same colour and design as minerals and crystals from all over the world - also shimmering and gleaming in the same way. In butterflies, wing colour is determined almost without exception by the scales that imbricate each wing surface. They are already well recognized for their advanced photonic ultrastructural designs. Despite their very limited thickness, relatively minor elaborations of the common architectural elements present in this generic scale will produce the many forms responsible for structurally generated colour in butterflies.