Rhaponticoides
Rhaponticoides
Genus of Asteraceae plants
Rhaponticoides is a genus of flowering plants in the family Asteraceae, found in northern Africa, southern and eastern Europe, and western Asia as far east as Mongolia. They were resurrected from Centaurea.[3]
In the 20th century the genus Centaurea was paraphyletic, because it was based on a type species, C. centaurium, which was less related to the vast majority of other Centaurea than to species which were classified as belonging to other genera. In 2001 Werner Greuter solved this by moving the C. centaurium and the related species in the former subgenus Centaurea to an old, resurrected genus: Rhaponticoides, he conserved the name Centaurea for the majority of the other species, and electing C. paniculata to serve as the new type species.[4][5][6]