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Type: Correspondence
Published: 2016-03-14
Page range: 231–232
Abstract views: 27
PDF downloaded: 1

Mycetia griffithii, a new name for Mycetia angustifolia (Hook.f.) Razafim. & B.Bremer (Rubiaceae)

College of Life Sciences, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, People’s Republic of China.
Department of Botany, Swedish Museum of Natural History, Box 50007, SE-10405 Stockholm, Sweden.
South China Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou 510650, People’s Republic of China. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, People’s Republic of China.
Rubiaceae Mycetia nomenclature Eudicots

Abstract

Myrioneuron R. Brown ex J. D. Hooker in Bentham & Hooker (1873: 69) comprises about eight species of the family Rubiaceae and it is distributed in East Himalaya to South China (Govaerts et al. 2011). Although it was occasionally treated as a synonym of Mycetia Reinwardt (1825: 9) (Bakhuizen 1975) or Keenania J. D. Hooker (1880: 101) (Van Steenis 1987, Robbrecht 1988), most botanists accepted it as a distinct genus (Kurz 1877, Hooker 1880, Schumann 1891, Pitard 1923, Merrill 1942, Bremekamp 1952, Deb 1996, Lo 1999, Wright 1999, Kress et al. 2003; Chen & Taylor 2011, Govaerts et al. 2011). Most recently, however, a molecular phylogenetic study revealed that Myrioneuron and Mycetia are non-monophyletic and intermixed, and therefore both taxa were combined to represent a monophyletic genus and Mycetia was accepted as its generic name (Ginter et al. 2015). In the study, they published nine new combinations, including Mycetia angustifolia (J. D. Hooker 1880: 97) Razafim. & B. Bremer in Ginter et al. (2015: 293). However, this name is illegitimate because it is a later homonym of Mycetia angustifolia Ridley (1923: 68), in accordance with Article 53.1 of the ICN (McNeil et al. 2012).