Lectotypification of Aongstroemia rufipes, a new synonym of Dicranella campylophylla (Dicranaceae, Bryophyta)

Abstract

During the revision of herbarium material of Anisothecium housed in JE, three duplicates of the original material of Aongstroemia rufipes Müller (1882: 388) were found. The material consists of fertile, abundant, and well-preserved plants.Aongstroemia rufipes was originally described by Carl Müller based on a collection made by Paul G. Lorentz in the high altitude grasslands of northwestern Argentina. It was later transferred to Anisothecium by Dusén (1903: 67).When describing the new species, Müller compared it with Aongstroemia jamesonii (Mitten 1859: 67) Müller (1882: 389) [=Dicranella hookeri (Müller 1851: 607) Cardot (1906: 4)], from which it was differentiated by “the capillaceous leaves and capsules without apophysis” (Müller 1882). We observed that several critical features of Aongstroemia rufipes, such as the sheathing leaf bases, and the mammillose upper laminal cells and subula, easily observed in cross-section (Fig. 1H) and on the marginal shoulder region from a superficial view (Fig. 1F), were indistinguishable from those in Dicranella campylophylla (Taylor 1848: 281) Spruce (1867: 1) (Larraín et al. 2010). Consequently, we propose A. rufipes as a new synonym of D. campylophylla. In the protologue, Müller (1882) did not designate a holotype; therefore, it is necessary to select a lectotype for A. rufipes among the available original specimens (ICN2018 Art. 8.1; Turland et al. 2018). We designate Lorentz’s collection JE04000569 (Fig. 2) in the Herbarium Haussknecht (JE) as the lectotype of Aongstroemia rufipes.