ANBG Friends Plant Science Group - Technical Talk
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Monday, 6 November 2017 - 10:30am
Life, the Universe and Pittosporaceae
Our speaker will be Dr Lindy Cayzer, Associate Scientist with the Queensland Herbarium and a visiting scientist at the Australian National Herbarium.
This talk introduces the important, but little known, old East Gondwanan plant family Pittosporaceae, which has all its higher level diversity in Australia: all nine genera and about 100 taxa. Only the genus Pittosporum has escaped the Australasian plate and is now found across the Paleotropics, but why this is so remains unclear. The family is currently being revised across its range, the first comprehensive revision since that of the German Botanist Pritzel in 1930.
Dr Lindy Cayzer was awarded the ABRS Churchill fellowship in 2016 to unlock the critical taxonomic information on the Pittosporaceae held in overseas herbaria and Institutions. She has just returned from completing this research and will be talking about the trials and tribulations of her archaeological dig into the taxonomic confusion of what is the genus Pittosporum.
