Selaginella ciliaris
species of plant in the family Selaginellaceae
Selaginella ciliaris is a plant in the family Selaginellaceae which is native to areas from India and Nepal eastwards to China and Taiwan, and south to northern Australia.
Description
This is a tiny, low growing herbaceous plant that forms small tufts at the bases of fallen trees and boulders. The creeping stem is up to 10 cm (3.9 in) long and produces roots along its length. It has ascending branches up to 5 cm (2.0 in) long. The leaves are very small, up to 2 mm (0.08 in) in length. The sporangia are borne in the upper leaf axils.
Taxonomy
The family Selaginellaceae is considered to be primitive and is often referred to as a "fern ally". This species has been described numerous times – the first description was published in 1789 by the Swedish botanist Anders Jahan Retzius who gave it the name Lycopodium ciliare. Several other 19th century botanists, including Robert Brown and Carl Ernst Otto Kuntze, also published this species under various binomial combinations. The currently accepted name, Selaginella ciliaris, was provided by Antoine Frédéric Spring and published in 1843.
“Selaginella ciliaris” enters the record as species of plant in the family Selaginellaceae. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Selaginella, ciliaris and species can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Selaginella ciliaris” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Selaginella, ciliaris and species provides the most credible route into that argument.
Stable identifiers, scientific names and standards terminology offer the best bridge between this overview and specialist evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q15250861. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1789 and 1843.
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This entry incorporates text from “Selaginella ciliaris” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.