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Summary

Myriopteris myriophylla, the Central American lace fern, is a species of lip fern. Despite its common name, this species is native as far south as Argentina. It is adapted to dry areas.

Taxonomy

In 1811, Nicaise Auguste Desvaux described two similar species, from Chile and Peru respectively, which he named Cheilanthes elegans and Cheilanthes myriophylla. He distinguished the two on the basis of their scales, reddish in C. elegans and whitish in C. myriophylla. An examination of his type material at the Paris Herbarium in the 20th century by Charles Alfred Weatherby revealed that the type of C. myriophylla is older and the scales have bleached and lost their color. They are in fact essentially identical, and Weatherby chose C. myriophylla as the name to take priority. Both species were (inadvertently) lectotypified to particular specimens in the Desvaux herbarium in 1989.

In 1842, John Smith put forth a new generic arrangement of ferns; he transferred C. myriophylla to Notholaena, a genus he characterized in part by long unbroken sori, as N. myriophylla. In the same year, Martin Martens & Henri Guillaume Galeotti described a new species, Cheilanthes paleacea, which they differentiated from C. lendigera on the basis of scale shape. The holotype, collected from the summit of Cuesta Blanca near Metztitlán, is Galeotti 6429 at the Brussels herbarium. A.L.A. Fée's classification of 1852 recognized a new segregate from Cheilanthes, the genus Myriopteris, which he separated from Cheilanthes proper by the presence of hairs among the sporangia and some characteristics of the indusium. He transferred Martens & Galeotti's species there as M. paleacea. Smith accepted Fée's new genus, but also observed that M. paleacea was conspecific with his N. myriophylla. Accordingly, he transferred C. myriophylla to the new genus as M. myriophylla in 1854. In 1857, he (erroneously) identified Fée's M. marsupianthes...