Euphorbia khandallensis, Blatter & Hallberg, 1921

Mane, Rohit N., Nerlekar, Ashish N., Lapalikar, Sairandhri A., Kambale, Sharad S. & Yadav, Shrirang R., 2017, The taxonomic status of two geophytic Euphorbia species (Euphorbiaceae) from Maharashtra, India, Phytotaxa 307 (2), pp. 141-146 : 141

Resurrection of E. khandallensis

Balakrishnan & Chakrabarty (2007) have included E. khandallensis as a variety of E. fusiformis ( E. fusiformis var. khandallensis (Blatt. & Hallb.) Binojkumar & Balakrishnan 2010: 280 ). Although Aditya (2010), in his revision of Indian geophytic Euphorbias referred to E. khandallensis as an accepted species, he did not discuss the taxonomic change made earlier by Balakrishnan & Chakrabarty (2007) and also did not explicitly resurrect it from its varietal rank. Later, Balakrishnan et al. (2012) retained the varietal rank of this taxon, creating further ambiguity. The major difference between E. fusiformis and E. khandallensis is the length of the cyathial pedicel (technically peduncle, referred to as pedicel by Balakrishnan et al. 2012), which is up to 5 cm in the former and 0.5 cm in latter (see Balakrishnan et al. 2012). Secondly, the roots of E. fusiformis are typically fusiform while in E. khandallensis they are highly irregular and never fusiform. Additionally, E. fusiformis is a widely distributed species and E. khandallensis a very restricted one. Hence, considering E. khandallensis as variety of E. fusiformis cannot be justified. Therefore, we propose to resurrect the specific status of E. khandallensis here based on the above mentioned differences. We believe that E. acaulis should be considered a synonym of E. fusiformis subject to further scrutiny ( Balakrishnan et al. 2012).