Morphology and Phylogenetic Analysis of Paloue and Related Genera in the Brownea Clade (Detarieae, Caesalpinioideae)

We present a morphological phylogenetic analysis of selected members of the Brownea clade (Detarieae: Caesalpinioideae), concentrating on generic and species-level relationships of Elizabetha, Paloue, Paloveopsis, and Heterostemon. The Brownea clade is composed of ca. eight genera. This study explores the phylogenetic relationships among those closely related genera found predominantly in the Guiana Shield region and used 125 morphological, anatomical, and floral characters in the analysis. A comparison is made between the morphological characters used by Richard Cowan to define generic and species boundaries and those found to be phylogenetically informative in this analysis. Characters previously used to delimit genera and species are explored in a phylogenetic context, and hypotheses of leaf and floral evolution are inferred.