The genus was
circumscribed in Hedwigia vol.42 on page 22 in 1903. The genus name of
Ruhlandiella is in honour of Wilhelm Otto Eugen Ruhland (1878–1960), who was a German
botanist, who worked firstly between 1899 and 1911 at the
Berlin Botanical Garden and Botanical Museum.
Ruhlandiella was originally a
monotypic genus, first described by
Paul Christoph Hennings in 1903, based on a single species:
R. berolinensis. His collections were made in a Berlin botanical greenhouse which contained
Eucalyptus plants from Australia. However, Rubio et al. (2010) recognized the strong morphological similarities between the two genera, and thus transferred
M. reticulatus and
M. truncatus to the genus
Ruhlandiella, as
Ruhlandiella reticulata and
Ruhlandiella truncata. Not long after, another species was described from Italy as
Ruhlandiella peregrina. Note that all these previous species were described either from Australia or Europe. In 2019, researchers from the
University of Florida College of Agricultural and Life Sciences described two more species of
Ruhlandiella discovered from deep Patagonian forests in South America (Chile and Argentina). These new species are
Ruhlandiella patagonica and
Ruhlandiella lophozoniae. Further morphological analysis suggests that these two species do not belong to the genus
Ruhlandiella. == Morphology ==