User:Choess/Phlegmariurus saururus

Phlegmariurus saururus is a species of clubmoss.

Taxonomy
The species was originally described as Lycopodium saururus by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in 1792, in the botanical division of the Encyclopédie Méthodique. He based his description on material from Réunion in the herbarium of Philibert Commerson. In 1805, Palisot de Beauvois transferred it to Plananthus, a genus which he segregated from Lycopodium, as Plananthus saururus.

Conte Vittore Trevisan rejected Palisot de Beauvois's circumscription of Plananthus as artificial, and placed many of its species instead in the older segregate genus Huperzia. He transferred L. saururus there as H. saururus. Wilhelm Herter considered Huperzia a nomen dubium and erected the genus Urostachys to replace it in 1922; he transferred the species there as U. saururus in 1923. However, the legitimacy of Huperzia was ultimately upheld, rendering Urostachys unnecessary.

Benjamin Øllgaard

Distribution and habitat
P. saururus, narrowly circumscribed, is found throughout central and southern mainland Africa, ranging from Cameroon and Ethiopia southward to the Western Cape of South Africa. It is also known from Madagascar, the Comoros, Mauritius and La Réunion. Material from Andean South America (Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina) and various South Atlantic and sub-Antarctic islands has been treated as a separate taxon, Huperzia insularis, by some authorities and lumped with P. saururus by others.