Revision of Passiflora Subgenus Decaloba ... - Passion Flowers

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The Passiflora coriacea Complex
Jussieu described P. coriacea in 1805 from a specimen collected in Colombia
by Bonpland. Shortly afterward several authors (e.g., Smith 1814 and Kunth
1817) described additional species based upon characters of the leaves (P.
clypeata Sm. and P. difformis Kunth). However, their descriptions seem to give
only an account of the vegetative variation within different populations of P.
coriacea Juss. in Colombia. Schlechtendal (1854) described P. sexocellata and
differentiated it from both P. coriacea and P. difformis based primarily upon the
vegetative morphology of the species (because the flowers of P. coriacea were
largely unknown), but his careful description of the flowers of his new species
differed markedly from those in Kunth's brief description of P. difformis (for further
information please see discussion of P. sexocellata in Chapter 8). In his revision
of the American species of Passifloraceae, Killip (1938) listed all of the species
discussed above plus several others (P. obtusifolia and P. cheiroptera Cortés) in
synonomy under P. coriacea. However, since that revision, MacDougal (1992,
2001) has described two new species, P. xiikzodz and P. mcvaughiana, and
resurrected one previously described species, P. obtusifolia, that were reported
from southwestern México under the name P. coriacea. In addition, both the
phenetic and cladistic analyses based upon both molecular and morphological
data presented here support the recognition of three distinct taxa: P. coriacea, P.
sexocellata, and P. megacoriacea.
The multivariate statistical analysis of the quantitative morphological
characters for P. coriacea s.l. produced a plotting pattern that clearly supports
the delimitation of the previously undescribed species P. megacoriacea, but it is