I think you meant it the other way around: Eriocactus magnificus was published before Eriocactus warasii! In fact there exists the combination Notocactus magnificus var. warasii. https://caryophyllales.org/cactaceae/cd ... 28c51fab7aTom in Tucson wrote: ↑Sat Sep 23, 2023 9:00 pm Notocactus magnificus, which most experts agree is no more than a form (or variety) of Notocactus warasii.
What Dave said may be true of some lumped genera in the past, but in this case there is valid evidence that lumping Parodia is not a bad idea.nachtkrabb wrote: ↑Mon Sep 25, 2023 10:32 pmHallo Dave, this is interesting information indeed. So here the Holy Burocracy sneaks into our nice classification system & wreaks havok.DaveW wrote: ↑Mon Sep 25, 2023 9:03 am (...) Hunt's morphological classification originally arose from trying to construct a simple classification for clueless Customs Officials to decide CITES issues instead of being a purely scientific one. Generally anything that looks remotely similar is lumped together, plus larger genera were easier to prohibit than having to individually distinguishing between many smaller ones! (...)
...oh gosh...
N.
There have been several molecular studies that hint at Parodia being monophyletic if lumped with the other genera (Notocactus, Eriocactus, Brasilicactus, etc). The most recent study being Nyffeler and Eggli's 2010 paper. Only 20 or species were sampled in that study (Parodia/Notocactus was not the focus of the study), but the results show that there is no clear cut way to divide these plants into only Parodia and Notocactus in such a way that the genetic relationships are conserved.
So the two options are to lump everything together into the oldest named genus (Parodia; the current popular approach), or to split everything into many smaller genera. Joël Lodé has taken the latter approach and has split these plants into Acanthocephala (a name that precedes Brasilicactus), Bolivicactus, Brasiliparodia, Eriocephala (a name that precedes Eriocactus), Notocactus, Parodia, and Wigginsia. At first I liked Lodé's splitting approach because it seemed to agree with morphological differences, but now I think he is jumping the gun, since there are 60 or so species currently accepted in the lumped Parodia, and only about a third of those have been sampled in molecular studies so far. A more complete study may validate the splitting, or may just show that there really is no internal separation that warrants splitting Parodia. If you're curious about Lodé's classification you can check out his website here.