Parinari excelsa, Sabine, Trans. Hort. Soc. London

Barbosa-Silva, Rafael Gomes, 2024, A Taxonomic Treatment of Parinari (Chrysobalanaceae) in the Atlantic Forest, Brazil, Systematic Botany (Basel, Switzerland) 49 (2), pp. 381-395 : 394

1. PARINARI EXCELSA Sabine, Trans. Hort. Soc. London , 5: 451. 1824. Parinarium excelsum Sabine. TYPE: SIERRA LEONE, fl., fr., G. Don s.n. (lectotype designated by Prance (1972): K [K000103545!]).

Parinari excelsa is an arboreal species that commonly occurs in forests in Africa ( White 1976). For many years after its publication, P. excelsa was considered by many authors to be a species with amphi-Atlantic distribution ( Oliver 1871; Kleinhoonte 1939; Prance 1972; White 1976; Prance and Sothers 2003). It was initially considered conspecific with the Amazonian species Parinari brachystachya Benth. ( Oliver 1871) , and posteriorly of other species from the Amazon and Atlantic Forest ( Prance 1972; Prance and Sothers 2003). However, White (1976) and Prance and White (1988) did not discard the possibility that the African and neotropical material represented distinct species, as the fruit morphology is differed between the two continents. Unfortunately, the name P. excelsa has been long used in taxonomic studies in the neotropical region and in herbarium collections.

Coradin ( Coradin et al. 1985) found phytochemical differences between samples of P. excelsa from Africa and the Americas. Later, the phylogenetic analysis ( Bardon et al. 2013), based on analysis of seven molecular markers and sampling two accessions of P. excelsa , one from Gabon and one from French Guiana, recovered each accession in different clades containing species from the same continent as the respective. The same phylogeny also contained one accession of P. brasiliensis , which was placed distantly from an Amazonian lineage identified as P. excelsa . Thus, the previous concepts of P. excelsa ( Prance 1972; Prance and Sothers 2003) were shown to not have a single evolutionary history, indicating that the name P. excelsa should be applied only to specimens from Africa, where the type collection was made. Prance (1972) included P. brachystachya and other names later published for Amazonian plants, such as Parinari laxiflora Ducke and Parinari laxiflora var. lata Ducke , in the synonymy of P. excelsa . As treated here, plants from the Amazon domain should be given the older name P. brachystachya , while for plants from the Atlantic Forest, P. brasiliensis is the correct name.