TAXON 62 (6) • December 2013: 1117–1132 Larraín & al. • Lumping or splitting in Racomitrium Lumping or splitting? The case of Racomitrium (Bryophytina: Grimmiaceae) Juan Larraín,1,2,7 Dietmar Quandt,2 Michael Stech3,4 & Jesús Muñoz5,6 1 Departamento de Botánica, Universidad de Concepción, Casilla 160-C, Concepción, Chile 2 Nees-Institut für Biodiversität der Pflanzen, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Meckenheimer Allee 170, 53115 Bonn, Germany 3 Naturalis Biodiversity Center, P.O. Box 9517, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands 4 Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands 5 Real Jardín Botánico (RJB-CSIC), Plaza de Murillo 2, 28014 Madrid, Spain 6 Centro de Investigación de la Biodiversidad y Cambio Climático, Universidad Tecnológica Indoamérica, Machala y Sabanilla, Quito, Ecuador 7 Current address: Science & Education, The Field Museum, 1400 South Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A. Author for correspondence: Juan Larraín,
[email protected] Abstract The genus Racomitrium (Grimmiaceae: Racomitrioideae) was recently segregated into four genera―Racomitrium, Niphotrichum, Codriophorus, and Bucklandiella―following an infrageneric division originally proposed more than 100 years ago based on morphological traits such as the presence and shape of laminal cell papillae and hyaline leaf hairpoints, and dif- ferences in peristome teeth morphology and costa structure. Here we present a molecular phylogeny of Racomitrium s.l. based on nuclear ITS and plastid rps4-trnL and trnK/matK-psbA sequences, to test the monophyly of these four morphological enti- ties. Our results solely support the monophyly of Racomitrium s.str., which includes only R. geronticum, R. lanuginosum, and R. pruinosum, while the members of the other segregate genera are distributed in different clades, rendering them polyphyletic (Bucklandiella, Codriophorus) or paraphyletic (Niphotrichum).