Main | Family List (MO) | Family List (INBio) | Cutting Edge Draft Treatments | Guidelines | Checklist | Citing | Editors The Cutting Edge Volume XXI, Number 4, October 2014 News and Notes | Leaps and Bounds | Germane Literature | Season's Pick CARYOPHYLLACEAE. While pursuing editorial work on the Manual Caryophyllaceae draft treatment, co-PI Barry Hammel sought to nail down the identity of three anomalous collections (two of them his own) that he had made a futile effort to shoehorn into Drymaria multiflora Brandegee. Returning to one of his original stations (in the northern Cordillera de Talamanca, along the Carretera Interamericana, between El Empalme and Santa María de Dota), he recollected the same entity, scoring good fertile material that led directly to an uequivocal determination: Drymaria ladewii Rusby, based on a Bolivian type and later reported from southern Mexico and Guatemala but never, as far as we were aware, from Costa Rica. Following up with a visit to the CR herbarium, Barry quickly learned that he was, in fact, not (by a longshot!) the first person to collect D. ladewii from Costa Rica, nor even the first to identify Costa Rican specimens as such: the sp. in question had been collected from the Cerros de Escazú (one of Barry's sites) in 1976 by the late Roy Lent, and from the Pacific slope of Volcán Barva in 1992 by the recently departed Jorge Gómez-Laurito. Moreover, both of those specimens had been determined as Drymaria ladewii back in 2004 by one "C. Rodríguez," apparently the Flora mesoamericana contributor for Caryophyllaceae. Recent determinations in TROPICOS by the same authority extend the Mesoamerican range of the sp. to El Salvador and westernmost Panama. Its Costa Rican distribution may be expressed as follows: "Bosque muy húmedo y pluvial, bordes de bosque, tacotales y orillas de quebradas, 1700–2000 m; vert. Pac. Cord. Central (Volcán Barva), N Cord. de Talamanca, Cerros de Escazú. Fl. ene., set.–dic." See Barry's Flickr site for images of this relatively robust, perennial RUBIACEAE. We have just learned of a new locality for the legendary and fantastic Osa pulchra (D. R. Simpson) Aiello, heretofore known only from small populations in the Baja Talamanca region (and adjacent Panama) and the Península de Osa (where some have suggested it may not occur naturally). Up-and-coming young botanist Isler Chinchilla recently found it in a rugged area at 275 m elevation near San Juan de Parrita, well north of the Osa region in the central Pacific lowlands. His collection (Chinchilla et al. 1883), made in a well-protected patch of forest, confirms the natural occurrence of the sp. on the Pacific slope (and we are also privy to an anecdotal report of a wild population on the Osa). Unfortunately, all of this information reaches us a few weeks too late for inclusion in the Manual Rubiaceae treatment, slated for imminent publication, so you'll need to annotate your copy as soon as it is in hand! TOP