Notes on Early Land Plants Today. 41. New combinations and synonyms in Cephaloziaceae (Marchantiophyta)
Abstract
Vilnet et al. (2012) and Feldberg et al. (2013) demonstrated that Cephalozia in the sense it has been treated in recent years is polyphyletic (e.g. Váňa 1988).
The genus as usually circumscribed falls into two clades. The clade with the type of Cephalozia also includes Metahygrobiella as demonstrated by Feldberg et al. (2013) without making any nomenclatural changes.
The other clade was shown by both studies to include Pleurocladula and Vilnet et al. (2013) therefore transferred many of the taxa included in their study to Pleurocladula. As they also demonstrated that Schofieldia belongs to this clade, they should have used this name for the genus as it is two years older.
A number of taxa not included in their phylogeny are morphologically related to their taxa and should also be transferred. Feldberg et al. (2013) showed that Fuscocephaloziopsis also belongs here.
As this name predates both Pleurocladula and Schofieldia, we transfer Pleurocladula and some Cephalozia species to Fuscocephaloziopsis. It should be noted, however, that there still are some taxa in Cephalozia that have been insufficiently studied to place them in any of the two genera.