Quantitative reconstruction of bioluminescent sources from boundary measurements is a challenging ill-posed inverse problem owing to the high degree of absorption and scattering of light through tissue. We present a hybrid multilevel reconstruction scheme by combining the ability of sparse regularization with the advantage of adaptive finite element method. In view of the characteristics of different discretization levels, two different inversion algorithms are employed on the initial coarse mesh and the succeeding ones to strike a balance between stability and efficiency. Numerical experiment results with a digital mouse model demonstrate that the proposed scheme can accurately localize and quantify source distribution while maintaining reconstruction stability and computational economy. The effectiveness of this hybrid reconstruction scheme is further confirmed with in vivo experiments.