Taxonomists trying to be “minimally disruptive”

A recent article in LifeScientist is a fairly conventional look at the eternal struggle for the soul of taxonomy between the morphologists and the gene-jockeys, though admittedly with an Antipodean slant. What makes it particularly interesting for us here is the choice of examples, which include a crop group in Citrus and its allied genera. It seems that molecular work suggests that the ancestors of the Australian genera in the sub-family Aurantoideae may have got there by “trans-oceanic dispersal,” possibly as a result of “cataclysmic events like cyclones.” Which sounds like something I need to find out more about…

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