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1. Introduction 14
specimens include all available type material from Australia (and in large parts types from
other continents), all accessible herbaria collections of this group from Australia and the
material collected during two field trips to Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria.
Where possible, the specimens were assigned to existing taxa, either (preferably) by
comparison with the type specimen or, if the specific type was unavailable, by verification of
the data provided in literature. Collections that could not be placed in described species were
either provisorically included to existing species or new species were introduced.
Currently c. 20 genera are accepted for Thelotremataceae (Eriksson, 2006; Frisch, 2006),
16 of which are known to occur in Australia (McCarthy, 2007). The circumscription of the
genera, however, is controversial. In the traditional classification, the ascospore septation and
coloration was used schematically to distinguish genera (Müller Argoviensis, 1887b). Since
the work of Hale (1980, 1981) and Salisbury (1971, 1972a, 1972b 1978), the genera in the
family are delimited mainly by the structure and pigmentation of the ascomata margin. These
characters, however, have so far scarcely been tested by molecular data. To approve that the
inferred phylogenies represent the evolution of the organisms, it was additionally attempted to
further illuminate the phylogenetic relationships within the family applying molecular
methods. Therefore, a total of three analyses were carried out employing datasets of two
different molecular markers from the nuclear and mitochondrial genome.