In article ,
mel turner wrote:
In article , wrote...
In article ,
mel turner wrote:
I guess
Solanums are the veggies of Gondwanaland. This would make it a
really old genus, antedating the south Atlantic Ocean. No wonder
it's so huge.
That conclusion seems unnecessary. The group could have
arisen much more recently, and dispersed and radiated
from wherever its place of origin happened to be. In fact,
they seem to argue for just this, since they speak of
New World ancestors, and not Gondawanaland ancestry.
TI: Implications for the phylogeny, classification, and biogeography
of Solanum from cpDNA restriction site variation.
AU: Olmstead-Richard-G {a}; Palmer-Jeffrey-D
SO: Systematic-Botany. 1997; 22 (1) 19-29..
Solanum as a whole and each of the three primary
clades appear to be New World in origin. Within Leptostemonum, African
and Australian members are derived from New World ancestors.
I read the New World ancestry assertion to be consistent with Solanum
having arisen in the part of Gondwanaland that became South America,
but it's hard to conclude anything from an abstract. I wonder if they
address this in the paper. It's hard to imagine how Solanums could
have crossed both the Atlantic and Pacific from South America, but I
don't know much about long-distance dispersal mechanisms.
Unfortunately, the university library has access to volumes 25(2000) to
present through one provider, and volumes 1-21 (1976-1996) through another
("moving wall system"). So I'll either have to wait a few months, or go
over to a physical library and find a physical journal...
Hmm, just wasted too much time searching what lit I can get at from my
desk, and it turns out that eggplants are in Leptostemonum, and can float
in seawater for five weeks and still have good seeds. This is in the
context of Madagascar which has two dozen endemic Solanum spp, but was
separated from Africa and the rest of Gondwanaland before the development
of flowering plants. Of course the straits are not all that wide.
Africa is just lousy with Solanum spp and there's a secondary center of
diversity in New Guinea. I better get back to the work I'm being paid
for...