(2917) Proposal to reject the name Aphanolejeunea angustissima (Lejeuneaceae)

(2917) Aphanolejeunea angustissima Steph., Sp. Hepat. 5: 859. 29 Mar 1916, nom. utique rej. prop. Lectotypus (vide Bonner, Index Hepat. 2: 235. 1962): “Guatemala, Coban, Türckheim, hb. Levier 5826” (G barcode G00067015). Aphanolejeunea angustissima Steph. is a validly published name of a new species. The type specimen (http://www.ville-ge.ch/musinfo/bd/cjb/chg/adetail.php?id=113712&lang=en) is sparse and contains only a few leaves belonging to two species, Cololejeunea gracilis (Jovet-Ast) Pócs (in Cryptog. Bryol. 29: 233. 2008) and C. papillosa (K.I. Goebel) Mizut. (in J. Hattori Bot. Lab. 29: 156. 1966), and the diagnosis contains elements of both taxa (Pócs & Bernecker in Polish J. Bot. 54: 74. 2009). The name was synonymized with Aphanolejeunea gracilis Jovet-Ast (in Rev. Bryol. Lichénol. 16: 21. 1947) (Cololejeunea gracilis) by Pócs & Lücking (in Haussknechtia, Beih. 7: 26. 1997), and, being the older name, was often used in that sense between 1997 and 2009. However, Pócs & Bernecker (1.c.) re-identified the type plants and found that they mostly belonged to Cololejeunea papillosa, also a younger name being based on Physocolea papillosa K.I. Goebel (in Ann. Jard. Bot. Buitenzorg 39: 41. 1928). Both Pócs & Bernecker (l.c.) and Gradstein & Ilkiu-Borges (in Mem. New York Bot. Gard. 76: 73. 2009) synonymized it with C. papillosa but explicitly rejected the name as being ambiguous. Aphanolejeunea angustissima has never been used in the sense of C. papillosa as it would have to be without its rejection. Search for use of the names in the literature in the online international bibliographic databases JSTOR (http://www.jstor.org), Web of Science (https://apps.webofknowledge.com/), and Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/), respectively (using the species names as the searching term, accessed 17 Aug 2022), gave the following number of hits: A. angustissima (2, 0, 23), A./C. gracilis (15, 3, 104), C. papillosa (1, 1, 26). To avoid further confusion with the use of Aphanolejeunea angustissima Steph. we propose to reject the name outright instead of “moving” the name from one possible later synonym to another. LS, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9315-4978 AH, https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8390-319x TP, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1359-1298 We thank John McNeill and John Wiersema for valuable comments on the proposal.