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in The Biology Files
A plant pundit comments on plants, the foibles and fun of academic life, and other things of interest.
Friday Fabulous Flower - Basal Angiosperm Flower at the stage of seed dispersal
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2 comments:
I hate to see this fine post sitting with no comments. As a botanical educator myself, I appreciate good, educational botanical content on the web. One of my special interests is botanical terminology, and I am probably out of the mainstream quite often. For example, I find the common usage of the term “pistil” unsettling, because it is used for both individual carpels and for structures consisting of several fused carpels. The difference is important, especially when discussing ancient angiosperms with separate carpels (apocarpous), like the Schisandra and Magnolia illustrated in your post. Carpels are the individual, ovule-containing chambers that evolved from folded structures in the first angiosperms. The preferred technical term for all the carpels in a flower, whether separate or fused together, is gynoecium (Greek for “ladies room”). If we must use the older term “pistil,” I’d prefer to use it only for a unit of several fused carpels, or at least to specify “unicarpellate pistil” if it is a single carpel. But then why not just say carpel? OK, enough botanical nit-picking for today. Keep up the great posts!
As one botany professor to another, one hates to pull rank, especially as a floral morphologist, but here's the problem. If you describe a gynoecium as "multicarpellate" you still have to indicate whether or not they are fused or separate. But when you say multi-pistillate you know each pistil is composed of a single carpel. However it is true that if a flower has a single pistil, you do not know if it consists of one or more carpels.
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