Habit: Plant in soil or rock crevices; rhizome short-creeping-decumbent, generally 3--5(8) mm wide, scales lance-linear, mid-stripe dark.
Leaf: stipe 5--20(32) cm, 0.5--2(3) mm wide, generally brown to red-brown (+- black); blade generally 2--3-pinnate, 2--8(15) cm, triangular or generally 5-sided, with white or yellow wax-like exudate ("farina") abaxially, with exudate or not adaxially, main axis shallowly to deeply grooved adaxially; proximal-most pinnae more strongly developed on basal side; veins free.
Sporangia: along veins +- throughout abaxial leaf surface; segment margins unmodified, recurved or not.
Species In Genus: 6 species: western North America.
Etymology: (Greek: 5 lines, for leaf blades)
Note: Isolated within cheilanthoid ferns; most closely related to remainder of "hemionitid" clade (otherwise represented in California by
Aspidotis; see Schuettpelz et al. 2007 Mol Phylo Evol 44:1172--1185; Windham et al. 2009 Amer Fern J 99:68--72). Comprises a puzzling complex of chemical, chromosomal, and morphological variants (see Yatskievych et al. 1990 Amer Fern J 80:9--17), recently recognized to include six distinct diploid lineages (treated here as species) and unnamed auto- and allo-polyploids (each diploid species except
P. pallida implicated in formation of at least one allopolyploid; Schuettpelz et al. 2015 Syst Bot 40:629--644). In most plants a wax-like exudate densely covers leaves abaxially; "green-backed" plants with sparse abaxial leaf exudate tend to be sterile hybrids with malformed spores (Smith et al. 1971 Amer J Bot 58:292--299). Species descriptions and key adapted from Schuettpelz et al. (2015 Syst Bot 40:629--644).
Jepson eFlora Author: Carl J. Rothfels, Ruth E.B. Kirkpatrick, Alan R. Smith, Thomas Lemieux & Edward Alverson
Index of California Plant Names (ICPN; linked via the Jepson Online Interchange)Key to Pentagramma
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