Talk:Rafflesiaceae

Family

I believe this article may have been reverted back in error. According to this article the family has now been found. The authenticity of this article should be accepted.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6251517.stm

The BBC claim that Charles Davis will be publishing his findings in the journal Science. In particular I feel that the panel on the right hand side of page indicating the family should be changed. I did provide the link in the edit summary. If for any reason you feel that my arguement is not sound please let me know. Sdp1978 10:47, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

First, the linked "article" is a secondary source, a news story about the original research and the paper that was published (and so far, published only online). Second, nobody working on this Wikipedia article, as far as I can tell, has actually read the original article. So I don't think anybody can confirm whether the authors have officially classified Rafflesia and its relatives in Euphorbiaceae--the abstract at Science doesn't suggest that. The classification of Euphorbiaceae is still a bit of a mess, and at least some genera have been removed to their own families, so I would actually be surprised if they took that step. Perhaps they have, but I want to read the original research paper in its entirety, or see confirmation that somebody else has, before these changes are made. MrDarwin 14:05, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Your right I shouldn't have used the word article, I hope that wasn't a cheap shot at me. I think it would be appropriate to mention C Davis's findings Sdp1978 14:57, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

Please find printed paper in:

Originally published in Science Express on 11 January 2007

Science 30 March 2007: Vol. 315. no. 5820, p. 1812 / DOI: 10.1126/science.1135260

Floral Gigantism in Rafflesiaceae Charles C. Davis,1* Maribeth Latvis,1 Daniel L. Nickrent,2 Kenneth J. Wurdack,3 David A. Baum4 Species of Rafflesiaceae possess the world's largest flowers (up to 1 meter in diameter), yet their precise evolutionary relationships have been elusive, hindering our understanding of the evolution of their extraordinary reproductive morphology. We present results of phylogenetic analyses of mitochondrial, nuclear, and plastid data showing that Rafflesiaceae are derived from within Euphorbiaceae, the spurge family. Most euphorbs produce minute flowers, suggesting that the enormous flowers of Rafflesiaceae evolved from ancestors with tiny flowers. Given the inferred phylogeny, we estimate that there was a circa 79-fold increase in flower diameter on the stem lineage of Rafflesiaceae, making this one of the most dramatic cases of size evolution reported for eukaryotes.

1 Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University Herbaria, 22 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. 2 Department of Plant Biology, Southern Illinois University, 1125 Lincoln Drive, Carbondale, IL 62901–6509, USA. 3 Department of Botany, Smithsonian Institution, NMNH MRC-166, Washington, DC 20013–7012, USA. 4 Department of Botany, University of Wisconsin, 430 LincolnDrive, Madison, WI53706, USA.

Trachelipus

New free use image

[1] could be used in this article. -- Cirt (talk) 15:36, 28 April 2010 (UTC)