Close-up of wing of the citrus swallowtail, Papilio demodocus, with the letter 'C' drawn in scales.
Photograph by Muhammad Mahdi Karim

The Butterfly Alphabet is a photographic artwork by the Norwegian naturalist Kjell Bloch Sandved.[1]

Sandved worked at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and came up with the idea with Barbara Bedette, a paleontologist, of finding all 26 letters of the Latin alphabet and the Arabic numerals 0 to 9 in the patterns on the wings of butterflies.

Sandved's photographic excursions led him to Brazil, Congo, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines. Searching for the forms took him over 24 years,[2] but he finished the collection in 1975 and published it in the Smithsonian Magazine. It was republished by Scholastic, as a book in 1996, with accompanying snippets about butterfly species.[3]

References

  1. ^ Pinar (13 November 2013). "Entire Alphabet Found on the Wing Patterns of Butterflies". My Modern Net.
  2. ^ Armstrong, Thomas (2003). The Multiple Intelligences of Reading and Writing: Making the Words Come Alive. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. p. 127. ISBN 978-0871207180.
  3. ^ "The Butterfly Alphabet". Kirkus Reviews. 1 January 1996.

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