Taxonomic Swap 110241 (Committed on 2022-05-10)

Although POWO does list Lantana urticoides as "Lantana × urticoides", by doing so they are themselves overriding Roger Sanders, whose work is widely accepted as the current authority on the genus Lantana worldwide. Sanders speculates that L. urticoides likely originated by hybridization between L. hirsuta and L. kingii, but that it has long since been a full legitimate species of its own, no less legitimate than any other Lantana species (and it has historically always been widely accepted at species level). Hybridization is a tremendous driver of the speciation of life on Earth, but after time passes and the new species survives and stabilizes, reproducing itself reliably true-to-form in its environment over the longterm, it is no longer considered a hybrid but instead its own species.

TAXONOMY OF LANTANA SECT. LANTANA (VE... (Citation)
Yes
Added by joshua_tx on May 3, 2022 06:06 PM | Committed by joshua_tx on May 10, 2022
replaced with

Comments

It is a smart decision. I agree and happy with the change. We need this certainty about what we call stable entities, which are worth as individual species per se.

Posted by huracan almost 2 years ago

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