Additional notes on the taxonomy of Parakeelya Hershk. (Montiaceae)

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 3 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 3 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. Parakeelya Hershk. (Montiaceae) has become the name conserved over the older name Rumicastrum Ulb. for a lineage of Australian plants historically classified in Calandrinia Kunth. In Candollean taxonomy persistent to the late 20th Century, Australian plants were classified in a large, heterogeneous, and polyphyletic circumscription of Calandrinia, later referred to by the designation “Calandrinia s. l.” Following cladistic dissection, Calandrinia “s. str.” was restricted to a small, homogeneous, and well-supported clade of American plants. The Australian plants were referred to the formerly monotypic and poorly studied genus Rumicastrum Ulb., and later to Parakeelya, which specifically excluded the latter. Australian specialists, however, eschewed both of these names and continued to classify existing and new Australian species as Calandrinia. However, they never justified this usage on taxonomic evidence. In some cases, they used the name Calandrinia as though it applied exclusively to the Australian plants, and they never explained why Rumicastrum does or does not pertain to this lineage. Phylogenetics researchers later appropriated the designation “Calandrinia s. l.” to refer to the Australian lineage plus Calandrinia s. str., and predicated to disprove its monophyly, which never was supported in the first place. They demonstrated that Rumicastrum indeed pertains to the Australian lineage, but they proposed nomenclatural conservation of Parakeelya. Yet, in numerous subsequent publications, they continued to use and describe new Australian species in Calandrinia. In the present work, I demonstrate that the application of the name Calandrinia to the Australian species and the designation “Calandrinia s. l.” for this plus Calandrinia s. str. were conceptually illegitimate, because they are conceptual homonyms for the taxa to which these names had been applied. I discuss evidence that this usage was deliberate with the objective of preventing the correct name Rumicastrum from being accepted for the Australian lineage. The evidence includes but is not limited to earlier-reported irregularities in the Australian authors’ proposal to conserve the name Parakeelya, including considerable factually incorrect or otherwise misleading information that biased in favor of the later approved conservation. I discuss this in terms of the equivalence of scientific names to scientific assertions, be they correct or erroneous, and incidentally or deliberately so. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2S02H Biodiversity Calandrinia, Parakeelya, Rumicastrum, Montiaceae, taxonomy, nomenclature, ICN, conceptual illegitimacy, conceptual homonymy Published: 2023-09-30 06:36 Last Updated: 2023-10-03 14:07 CC-By Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Conflict of interest statement: None Language: English Views: 641 Downloads: 767