Copiapoa gigantea Backeb., Jahrb. Deutsche Kakt. Ges.

Walter, Helmut E. & Guerrero, Pablo C., 2022, Towards a unified taxonomic catalogue for the Chilean cacti: assembling molecular systematics and classical taxonomy, Phytotaxa 550 (2), pp. 79-98 : 90

Copiapoa gigantea Backeb., Jahrb. Deutsche Kakt. Ges. 1: 104. 1936.

Type:—Not designated.

= Copiapoa eremophila F. Ritter, Kakt. Südam. 3: 1104–1105. 1980.

Type:— CHILE, östl. Paposo , s.d. [1956], Ritter 208b [holotype SGO124843 , (corpus), areoles, spines] .

Notes: —Backeberg (1936: 104) gave a vague type locality (“ Chile: Provinz Antofagasta, auf nachts oft nebelfeuchten Berggipfeln” = “ Chile: Province Antofagasta, on mountain peaks that are often damp at night”) in the protologue of his Copiapoa gigantea . Later, the same author (Backeberg 1977: 107) specified the locality as “above Paposo”. Ritter (1980: 1100) accepted Backeberg’s species for plants occurring east of Paposo area (“Gegen die Wüste des Hinterlandes wächst sie aber nur gegen Süden, während sie im gleichen Klima und in gleicher Höhenlage etwas nördlicher, nämlich östlich von PAPOSO ...” = “Towards the desert of the hinterland, however, it [ Copiapoa gigantea var. gigantea ] only grows towards the south, while in the same climate and at the same altitude it grows a little further north, namely east of PAPOSO ...”) and proposed C. haseltoniana Backeb. at variety rank of C. gigantea ( Ritter 1980: 1101) for plant occurrring in “... nördlich Paposo an der Küste ...” (= “... north of Paposo on the coast ...”).

Concerning Copiapoa eremophila, Ritter (1980: 1105) reported “Typusort. östlich von PAPOSO am Rand der Vollwüste als einzige noch wachsende Kakteenart; nur von hier bekannt. Von mir entdeckt 1956. Nr. FR 476 (=208a)”, the “Typusort” can be considered as “ holotype ”. We traced this specimen at SGO. Its morphology corresponds to the current concept of C. gigantea (see e.g., Larridon et al. 2015).

The “current” concept of Copiapoa gigantea (based on molecular evidence) is Larridon 2015. There are no other works occupying with the status of C. gigantea . Former concepts treated C. gigantea as a synonym of C. cinerea subsp. haseltonia (Hunt et al., Hoffmann & Walter (2004), Anderson (2001) as a synonym of Copiapoa haseltonia and Slaba, (in Kaktussy (special) 33: 3. 1997) as C. cinerea subsp. gigantea for sharing the following characters: Apical wool orange-brown; large dense multi-headed mounds; stem diameter 10–25 cm, farina-covered; spines honey-coloured, later turning greyish-blackish, more numerous at higher elevations; young areoles orange brown.Accordingly, and since the type locality of C. eremophila is nearly the same of that of C. gigantea (Paposo) , we here propose to synonymize the two names.