ABSTRACT
The problematic biologist Rafinesque published a book in 1838 called the New Flora and Botany of North America. In the fourth volume of that work, he proposed the generic name Blutaparon. As with most of his erratic publications, the scientific establishment ignored this generic name until the 1980s. Then, James A. Mears resurrected Blutaparon and separated it from Philoxerus, into which it had previously been submerged. As now understood, Philoxerus is an Australasian genus that was originally described from Australia by Robert Brown in 1810 (Mears 1982a,b, Kanis 1984). As now circumscribed, Blutaparon contains four species in the Ryukyu Islands, the Americas, and West Africa.
