Leptosema cervicornu
Leptosema cervicornu is a species of flowering plant in the family Fabaceae and is endemic to inland areas of Western Australia. It is a shrub with many tangled branches and branchlets, leaves reduced to egg-shaped scales, green flowers sometimes with a red tinge, and beaked broadly oval pods.
Description
Leptosema cervicornu is a shrub with many tangled branches and branchlets, and that typically grows to up to high and wide. Its leaves are reduced to egg-shaped, dark red scales, up to long. The flowers are densely packed, red, resupinate, and borne in densely packed rosettes, each flower on a pedicel up to long on a rhachis up to long with egg-shaped bracts about long. The sepals are long and form a tube long. The petals are greenish, sometimes with a red tinge, the standard petal is enclosed in the sepals, long and broad, the wings are linear, long and about wide with the keel protruding and long. The ovary is more or less sessile with about 45 ovules. The pods are very broadly oval, long and wide including a beak long, containing a single striated seed.Taxonomy
Leptosema cervicornu was first formally described in 1999 by Michael Crisp in Australian Systematic Botany from specimens collected east of Southern Cross in 1980. The specific epithet means 'deer- or stag-horn', referring to the branching pattern of the plant.In the original description, the specific epithet was spelled cervicorne but in 2019, Alex George suggested that the required nominative or ablative case is cervicornu. In 2020, the epithet was corrected to cervicornu.