families

[Thomas G. Lammers]

At 07:27 AM 03-03-99 -0800, you wrote:

 Perhaps there is a shared apomorphy that causes the tiny annual
>Eriophyllum wallacei of the Mojave Desert, the tree-sized Montanoas of
>Mexico, and the Hawai`ian silverswords to all be successful. If that
>apomorphy could be discovered, the clade that it diagnosed (whether a
>family or some other rank, or even unnamed) could be said to have
>ecological importance.

Art Cronquist wrote somewhere that he felt the family's success was due to
innovations in chemical defenses against predation, e.g., sesquiterpene
lactones.


Thomas G. Lammers

Classification, Nomenclature, Phylogeny and Biogeography
of the Campanulaceae, s. lat.

Department of Botany
Field Museum of Natural History
Roosevelt Road at Lake Shore Drive
Chicago, Illinois 60605-2496 USA

e-mail:    tlammers at fmnh.org
office:          312-922-9410 ext. 317 (voice-mail)
fax:                312-427-2530

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