From Plant Press, Vol. 26, No. 4, October 2023.
The sunflower family (Compositae) has the largest number of accepted species of any plant family, estimated to be between 25,000 to 30,000 in ca. 1,700 genera. Because of the size of the family and its complexity of flower structures, Compositae is divided into 45 tribes to reflect evolutionary relationships and shared characteristics. Harold Robinson and Sterling Keeley worked on one of the larger tribes in this family, Vernonieae. Morphologically diverse and globally distributed, this tribe comprises over 1,500 species with extensive distributions in both the Old and New Worlds. Coined as the “evil tribe” by Vicki Funk, this tribe has a continuum of overlapping morphological characters/states which makes it very difficult to resolve many of its systematic relationships.
Morphological work by Robinson and phylogenomic studies of Keeley in the past 40 years are only now beginning to tease apart this complicated “evil tribe” and provide a better understanding of the underlying morphological relationships within. With strong support from a recent molecular phylogenetic study of the Vernonieae across its entire geographical range by Keeley and the work by Robinson, ten Mexican species of Vernonia and Vernonanthura were transferred to the new genus, Vickianthus in the newly released paper, “Vickianthus, a new genus of the Vernonieae (Compositae) from Mexico” by Harold Robinson†, Vicki A. Funk†, Carol L. Kelloff, and Raymund Chan, and is published in Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas (https://doi.org/10.17348/jbrit.v17.i1.1291).
As Robinson states in the paper, “The name of the genus is chosen to honor the late Dr. Vicki Ann Funk (not Victoria), who was (and remains) a coauthor on the paper in spite of the present decision to name the genus for her”. Unfortunately, Robinson also passed away before the paper was finished, so to honor Robinson, the paper was completed in this present version by his co-authors.
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