星毛蕨属 xing mao jue shu

Authors: Youxing Lin & Kunio Iwatsuki

Plants trailing, in soil. Rhizomes long creeping, stipe bases with sparse hairy dark brown scales. Fronds clustered or approximate; stipes subglabrous; laminae lanceolate; rachises usually prolonged, whiplike and rooting on soil and forming a new plant, 1-pinnate; pinnae ca. 30 pairs; pinna axils often with gemmae producing a 1-pinnate small lamina. Veins evident, veinlets obliquely spreading and joining by their ends, a tortuous excurrent veinlet connected with veinlets of every pair to marginal sinus and forming a line of oblique square areoles. Laminae papery, greenish or dark brown-green, with forked or simple short hairs along both sides of rachises and intercostal areas, glabrous when old. Sori suborbicular or oblong, exindusiate. Sporangia glabrous. Spores elliptic, monolete, perispore thin and translucent, minutely reticulate and with small spines.

One species: tropical and subtropical regions of the Old World.

Lower Taxon

• Ampelopteris prolifera (Retzius) Copeland