Taxonomy
With about 750 species, Ficus (Moraceae) is one of the largest angiosperm genera (David Frodin of Chelsea Physic Garden ranked it as the 31st largest genus). Ficus aurea is classified in the subgenus Urostigma (the strangler figs) and the section Americana. Recent molecular phylogenies have shown that subgenus Urostigma is polyphyletic, but have strongly supported the validity of section Americana as a discrete group (although its exact relationship to section Galoglychia is unclear).
Thomas Nuttall described the species in the second volume of the his 1846 work The North American Sylva with specific epithet aurea ('golden' in Latin). In 1768, Scottish botanist Philip Miller described Ficus maxima, citing Carl Linnaeus' Hortus Cliffortianus (1738) and Hans Sloane's Catalogus plantarum quæ in insula Jamaica (1696). Sloane's illustration of the species, published in 1725, depicted it with figs borne singly, a characteristic of the Ficus subgenus Pharmacosycea. As a member of the subgenus Urostigma, F. aurea has paired figs. However, a closer examination of Sloane's description led Cornelis Berg to conclude that the illustration depicted a member of the subgenus Urostigma (since it had other diagnostic of that subgenus), almost certainly F. aurea, and that the illustration of singly borne figs was probably artistic license. Berg located the plant collection upon which Sloane's illustration was based and concluded that Miller's F. maxima was, in fact, F. aurea. In his description of F. aurea, which was based on plant material collected in Florida, Thomas Nuttall considered the possibility that his plants belonged to the species that Sloane had described, but came to the conclusion that it was a new species. Under the rules of botanical nomenclature, the name F. maxima has priority over F. aurea since Miller's description was published in 1768, while Nuttall's description was published in 1846.
In their 1914 Flora of Jamaica, William Fawcett and Alfred Barton Rendle linked Sloane's illustration to the tree species that was then known as Ficus suffocans, a name that had been assigned to it in August Grisebach's Flora of the British West Indian Islands. Gordon DeWolf agreed with their conclusion and used the name F. maxima for that species in the 1960 Flora of Panama. Since this use has become widespread, Berg proposed that the name Ficus maxima be conserved in the way DeWolf had used it, a proposal that was accepted by the nomenclatural committee.
Reassigning the name Ficus maxima did not leave F. aurea as the oldest name for this species, as German naturalist Johann Heinrich Friedrich Link had described Ficus ciliolosa in 1822. Berg concluded that the species Link described was actually F. aurea, and since Link's description predated Nuttall's by 24 years, priority should have been given to the name F. ciliolosa. Since the former name was widely used and the name F. ciliolosa had not been, Berg proposed that the name F. aurea be conserved. In response to this, the nomenclatural committee ruled that rather than conserving F. aurea, that it would be better to reject F. ciliolosa. Conserving F. aurea would mean that precedence would be given to that name over all others. By simply rejecting F. ciliolosa, the committee left open the possibility that the name F. aurea could be supplanted by another older name, if one were to be discovered.
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