Ilaria Maria Grimaldi | University of Oxford (original) (raw)

Papers by Ilaria Maria Grimaldi

American Journal of Botany, 2022

In his 1959 book Africa: Its Peoples and their Culture History, George P. Murdock suggested that ... more In his 1959 book Africa: Its Peoples and their Culture History, George P. Murdock suggested that a Malaysian complex of crops dispersed to Africa in ancient times across the Indian Ocean along the Sabaean Lane. The Malaysian complex comprised bananas, sugarcane, taro, three yam species, rice, Polynesian arrowroot, breadfruit, coconut, areca palm and betel leaf. Except for rice, arrowroot and potentially taro, most of these crops were domesticated in the Island Southeast Asia-New Guinea region, from where they dispersed to Africa. Our reassessment of agronomic, archaeological, Classical, genetic and historical sources shows that we need to go beneath standard historical narratives to recover a much more ancient and complex history of crop introductions to Africa. Despite considerable uncertainty and fragmented research, we are still able to conclude that the Malaysian complex of crops did not arrive in Africa as a complete assemblage at one time or along one route. Multiple lines of evidence suggest that these crops arrived in Africa at different times and followed different pathways of introduction to the continent. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

We reveal the enigmatic origin of one of the earliest surviving botanical collections. The 16 th-... more We reveal the enigmatic origin of one of the earliest surviving botanical collections. The 16 th-century Italian En Tibi herbarium is a large, luxurious book with c. 500 dried plants, made in the Renaissance scholarly circles that developed botany as a distinct discipline. Its Latin inscription, translated as "Here for you a smiling garden of everlasting flowers", suggests that this herbarium was a gift for a patron of the emerging botanical science. We follow an integrative approach that includes a botanical similarity estimation of the En Tibi with contemporary herbaria (Aldrovandi, Cesalpino, "Cibo", Merini, Estense) and analysis of the book's watermark, paper, binding, handwriting, Latin inscription and the morphology and DNA of hairs mounted under specimens. Rejecting the previous origin hypothesis (Ferrara, 1542-1544), we show that the En Tibi was made in Bologna around 1558. We attribute the En Tibi herbarium to Francesco Petrollini, a neglected 16 th-century botanist, to whom also belongs, as clarified herein, the controversial "Erbario Cibo" kept in Rome. The En Tibi was probably a work on commission for Petrollini, who provided the plant material for the book. Other people were apparently involved in the compilation and offering of this precious gift to a yet unknown person, possibly the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand I. The En Tibi herbarium is a Renaissance masterpiece of art and science, representing the quest for truth in herbal medicine and botany. Our multidisciplinary approach can serve as a guideline for deciphering other anonymous herbaria, kept safely "hidden" in treasure rooms of universities, libraries and museums.

PLoS ONE, 2018

Taro, Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott, is a vegetable and starchy root crop cultivated in Asia, O... more Taro, Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott, is a vegetable and starchy root crop cultivated in Asia, Oceania, the Americas, Africa, and the Mediterranean. Very little is known about its early history in the Mediterranean, which previous authors have sought to trace through Classical (Greek and Latin) texts that record the name colocasia (including cognates) from the 3rd century BC onwards. In ancient literature, however, this name also refers to the sacred lotus, Nelumbo nucifera Gaertn. and its edible rhizome. Like taro, lotus is an alien introduction to the Mediterranean, and there has been considerable confusion regarding the true identity of plants referred to as colocasia in ancient literature. Another early name used to indicate taro was arum, a name already attested from the 4th century BC. Today, this name refers to Arum, an aroid genus native to West Asia, Europe, and the Mediterranean. Our aim is to explore historical references to taro in order to clarify when and through which routes this plant reached the Mediterranean. To investigate Greek and Latin texts, we performed a search using the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) and the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL), plus commentaries and English and French translations of original texts. Results show that while in the early Greek and Latin literature the name kolokasia (Greek κολοκάσια) and its Latin equivalent colocasia refer to Nelumbo nucifera Gaertn., after the 4th century AD a poorly understood linguistic shift occurs, and colocasia becomes the name for taro. We also found that aron (Greek ἄρον) and its Latin equivalent arum are names used to indicate taro from the 3rd century BC and possibly earlier.

International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science, 2018

Traditional gastronomy and cuisine play an important role in building national and personal ident... more Traditional gastronomy and cuisine play an important role in building national and personal identities. In an era of globalization of food systems and dietary patterns where transnational food companies are rapidly expanding in Sub-Saharan Africa, and there is a risk that national differences blur and fade away, communities can keep a strong and confident sense of their identity and culture. Preserving culinary knowledge helps to preserve genetic diversity and it is also essential to maintain and strengthen ethnic and cultural identities. During a study on taro cultivars, Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott, conducted in Southwest, Northwest and West Cameroon, local farmers mentioned a traditional dish known as Achu made by pounding taro corms into a dough-type paste, which is accompanied by different sauces. To document the culinary heritage associated to this popular dish, we asked farmers to show a step-by-step preparation of Achu, identify different ingredients and explain why these were included. We recorded the preparation of this traditional meal with pictures that we report here with the original recipe.

Until recently, taro Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott, was considered a neglected food crop due to... more Until recently, taro Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott, was considered a neglected food crop due to its low palatability and inferior value compared to other root crops such as cassava, potatoes and yams. Under the impulse of new studies on plant dispersal, and in light of the severe threats posed by pests to its conservation status, this crop has finally received more attention. However, there is still insufficient knowledge on specific cultivars and their culinary and medicinal uses, especially in Africa. We studied the agrodiversity of taro cultivars in Nigeria, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, and Tanzania. Here, we present ethnobotanical, morphological and linguistic data of 20 taro cultivars, as well as specific notes on abandoned landraces. These traditional varieties represent valuable genetic resources and can be instrumental in protecting taro from the genetic erosion caused by preference for yautia, and diseases such as the leaf blight. With this work, we call for renewed efforts to conserve this species and its landraces.

Taro (Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott) is a tropical plant of Asian origin, which is now extensiv... more Taro (Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott) is a tropical plant of Asian origin, which is now extensively cultivated in Africa, with Nigeria and Cameroon providing 60% of the worldwide production. Despite the economic role and long history of taro in Africa, there is no structured information available on the morphological diversity, cultivation, trade, culinary, and medicinal uses associated with this crop in Africa. This paper presents the results of a literature review of taro in Africa using the references stored in the Prelude database of African medicinal plants, to provide a more comprehensive picture of the current scientific knowledge on the utilization of this crop. Our results include information found in the African floras, published papers, as well as in the gray literature sources, and they show that taro is not only a food crop known under a large diversity of names that vary by region, but it is also widely used as a medicinal plant to cure human and animal diseases. The many local names applied to taro almost never have a correspondent morphological description in the literature. Combined genetic and ethnobotanical studies of this crop in Africa are needed to link cultivars to cultivation techniques, medicinal and culinary uses.

The domestication of plants and animals marks one of the most significant transitions in human, a... more The domestication of plants and animals marks one of the most significant transitions in human, and indeed global, history. Traditionally , study of the domestication process was the exclusive domain of archaeologists and agricultural scientists; today it is an increasingly multidisciplinary enterprise that has come to involve the skills of evolutionary biologists and geneticists. Although the application of new information sources and methodologies has dramatically transformed our ability to study and understand do-mestication, it has also generated increasingly large and complex datasets, the interpretation of which is not straightforward. In particular, challenges of equifinality, evolutionary variance, and emergence of unexpected or counter-intuitive patterns all face researchers attempting to infer past processes directly from patterns in data. We argue that explicit modeling approaches, drawing upon emerging methodologies in statistics and population genetics, provide a powerful means of addressing these limitations. Modeling also offers an approach to analyzing datasets that avoids conclusions steered by implicit biases, and makes possible the formal integration of different data types. Here we outline some of the modeling approaches most relevant to current problems in domes-tication research, and demonstrate the ways in which simulation modeling is beginning to reshape our understanding of the do-mestication process. model | inference | evolution | agriculture | Neolithic T he emergence of agriculture beginning some 10,000 y ago marked more than a change in human patterns of subsistence. The beginnings of food production ushered in an era of radically new relationships between humans and other species, dramatic new evolutionary pressures, and fundamental transformations to the earth's biosphere. The evolutionary process of plant and animal domestication by humans led to morphological, physiological, behavioral, and genetic differentiation of a wide range of species from their wild progenitors (1, 2). The selection pressures that were placed on such species continue today, sometimes through direct genetic modification, and both the processes and their outcomes are accordingly of significant broader interest. Domestication is also part of a cultural evolutionary process (3, 4), and some human genes have evolved in response to cultural innovations (5–8), much as the genes of domesticated species have changed under the impact of human artificial selection. The study of domestication today is a multidisciplinary enterprise in which archaeologists and agricultural scientists have been joined by evolutionary biologists and population geneticists (2, 9). At least five major sets of questions tend to reoccur in the domestication literature. The first three are demographic: (i) When, where, and in how many geographic locations was a given species domesticated? (ii) What were the dispersal routes from the original domestication centers? (iii) To what extent did hy-bridization between domesticates and local wild relatives occur? The remaining questions relate to adaptation: (iv) To what extent , and how rapidly, were domestic traits fixed? (v) How well did domesticates adapt to diverse anthropogenic environments? Most of these questions can be at least partially addressed using population genetic data from both ancient and modern samples. This is because variation across the genome is shaped by—and thus reflects—past demography, whereas genetic variation in and around particular genes determining key phenotypic traits is shaped by adaptation history. These principles, in combination with the availability of increasing quantities of ancient and modern genetic data, have led to a profusion of studies on particular domestication scenarios (e.g., refs. 10 and 11). However , the relationship between genetic data and the demographic or adaptation history that shaped it is noisy and often difficult to predict. This difficulty is primarily because: (i) in any evolving system that includes stochastic processes, patterns in genetic (or archaeological) data could have been generated under a range of Significance Our knowledge of the domestication of animal and plant species comes from a diverse range of disciplines, and interpretation of patterns in data from these disciplines has been the dominant paradigm in domestication research. However, such interpretations are easily steered by subjective biases that typically fail to account for the inherent randomness of evolutionary processes, and which can be blind to emergent patterns in data. The testing of explicit models using computer simulations, and the availability of powerful statistical techniques to fit models to observed data, provide a scientifically robust means of addressing these problems. Here we outline the principles and argue for the merits of such approaches in the context of domestication-related questions.

Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa, 2014

In: Ursula Thanheiser (ed.) News from the past, Progress in African archaeobotany. Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on African Archaeobotany in Vienna, 2 – 5 July 2012. Advances in Archaeobotany 3. Barkhuis: Groningen, 2016

Taro is an ancient crop native to Asia which is now found in all tropical and warm temperate regi... more Taro is an ancient crop native to Asia which is now found in all tropical and warm temperate regions of the world. Its present distribution is the result of a long history of use and translocation. Whilst in the Pacific much effort has been made to understand the role this plant played in prehistory, it has not received the same attention in Africa, even though it is a staple crop in some West African countries. recently, the retrieval of macro remains of dessicated taro at the Islamic port of Quseir al-Qadim in Egypt has revitalised the debate on the history of taro in Africa, and genetic has been initiated to reconstruct its introduction into the continent. Fieldwork and a genetic survey of taro in Africa was carried out as part of a project led by Dr Nicole Boivin (University of Oxford) and Dr Robin G. Allaby (University of Warwick). While analysis of the survey results is ongoing, a geographical and cultural appraisal of taro is presented here.

Conference Presentations by Ilaria Maria Grimaldi

Talks by Ilaria Maria Grimaldi

Other by Ilaria Maria Grimaldi

Helleria Ebner is a relict terrestrial isopod that is found only in a few delimited locations in ... more Helleria Ebner is a relict terrestrial isopod that is found only in a few delimited locations in the Mediterranean area. Analyses of 631 bp of the COI were used to investigate the phylogenetic relationships between 15 populations. In particular, trees were constructed using Maximum Parsimony (Branch and Bound method), and Neighbor Joining. The model of evolution was calculated with MODEL TEST (Posada et al., 1998), and results showed that Helleria populations found in Sardinia, Corsica, Tuscany and France underwent allopatric speciation in the last 20 million years. characterization of the first epimeral plate was also performed, and that indicated that this character can be used as morphological character for the inter population identification.

American Journal of Botany, 2022

In his 1959 book Africa: Its Peoples and their Culture History, George P. Murdock suggested that ... more In his 1959 book Africa: Its Peoples and their Culture History, George P. Murdock suggested that a Malaysian complex of crops dispersed to Africa in ancient times across the Indian Ocean along the Sabaean Lane. The Malaysian complex comprised bananas, sugarcane, taro, three yam species, rice, Polynesian arrowroot, breadfruit, coconut, areca palm and betel leaf. Except for rice, arrowroot and potentially taro, most of these crops were domesticated in the Island Southeast Asia-New Guinea region, from where they dispersed to Africa. Our reassessment of agronomic, archaeological, Classical, genetic and historical sources shows that we need to go beneath standard historical narratives to recover a much more ancient and complex history of crop introductions to Africa. Despite considerable uncertainty and fragmented research, we are still able to conclude that the Malaysian complex of crops did not arrive in Africa as a complete assemblage at one time or along one route. Multiple lines of evidence suggest that these crops arrived in Africa at different times and followed different pathways of introduction to the continent. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

We reveal the enigmatic origin of one of the earliest surviving botanical collections. The 16 th-... more We reveal the enigmatic origin of one of the earliest surviving botanical collections. The 16 th-century Italian En Tibi herbarium is a large, luxurious book with c. 500 dried plants, made in the Renaissance scholarly circles that developed botany as a distinct discipline. Its Latin inscription, translated as "Here for you a smiling garden of everlasting flowers", suggests that this herbarium was a gift for a patron of the emerging botanical science. We follow an integrative approach that includes a botanical similarity estimation of the En Tibi with contemporary herbaria (Aldrovandi, Cesalpino, "Cibo", Merini, Estense) and analysis of the book's watermark, paper, binding, handwriting, Latin inscription and the morphology and DNA of hairs mounted under specimens. Rejecting the previous origin hypothesis (Ferrara, 1542-1544), we show that the En Tibi was made in Bologna around 1558. We attribute the En Tibi herbarium to Francesco Petrollini, a neglected 16 th-century botanist, to whom also belongs, as clarified herein, the controversial "Erbario Cibo" kept in Rome. The En Tibi was probably a work on commission for Petrollini, who provided the plant material for the book. Other people were apparently involved in the compilation and offering of this precious gift to a yet unknown person, possibly the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand I. The En Tibi herbarium is a Renaissance masterpiece of art and science, representing the quest for truth in herbal medicine and botany. Our multidisciplinary approach can serve as a guideline for deciphering other anonymous herbaria, kept safely "hidden" in treasure rooms of universities, libraries and museums.

PLoS ONE, 2018

Taro, Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott, is a vegetable and starchy root crop cultivated in Asia, O... more Taro, Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott, is a vegetable and starchy root crop cultivated in Asia, Oceania, the Americas, Africa, and the Mediterranean. Very little is known about its early history in the Mediterranean, which previous authors have sought to trace through Classical (Greek and Latin) texts that record the name colocasia (including cognates) from the 3rd century BC onwards. In ancient literature, however, this name also refers to the sacred lotus, Nelumbo nucifera Gaertn. and its edible rhizome. Like taro, lotus is an alien introduction to the Mediterranean, and there has been considerable confusion regarding the true identity of plants referred to as colocasia in ancient literature. Another early name used to indicate taro was arum, a name already attested from the 4th century BC. Today, this name refers to Arum, an aroid genus native to West Asia, Europe, and the Mediterranean. Our aim is to explore historical references to taro in order to clarify when and through which routes this plant reached the Mediterranean. To investigate Greek and Latin texts, we performed a search using the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) and the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (TLL), plus commentaries and English and French translations of original texts. Results show that while in the early Greek and Latin literature the name kolokasia (Greek κολοκάσια) and its Latin equivalent colocasia refer to Nelumbo nucifera Gaertn., after the 4th century AD a poorly understood linguistic shift occurs, and colocasia becomes the name for taro. We also found that aron (Greek ἄρον) and its Latin equivalent arum are names used to indicate taro from the 3rd century BC and possibly earlier.

International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science, 2018

Traditional gastronomy and cuisine play an important role in building national and personal ident... more Traditional gastronomy and cuisine play an important role in building national and personal identities. In an era of globalization of food systems and dietary patterns where transnational food companies are rapidly expanding in Sub-Saharan Africa, and there is a risk that national differences blur and fade away, communities can keep a strong and confident sense of their identity and culture. Preserving culinary knowledge helps to preserve genetic diversity and it is also essential to maintain and strengthen ethnic and cultural identities. During a study on taro cultivars, Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott, conducted in Southwest, Northwest and West Cameroon, local farmers mentioned a traditional dish known as Achu made by pounding taro corms into a dough-type paste, which is accompanied by different sauces. To document the culinary heritage associated to this popular dish, we asked farmers to show a step-by-step preparation of Achu, identify different ingredients and explain why these were included. We recorded the preparation of this traditional meal with pictures that we report here with the original recipe.

Until recently, taro Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott, was considered a neglected food crop due to... more Until recently, taro Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott, was considered a neglected food crop due to its low palatability and inferior value compared to other root crops such as cassava, potatoes and yams. Under the impulse of new studies on plant dispersal, and in light of the severe threats posed by pests to its conservation status, this crop has finally received more attention. However, there is still insufficient knowledge on specific cultivars and their culinary and medicinal uses, especially in Africa. We studied the agrodiversity of taro cultivars in Nigeria, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, and Tanzania. Here, we present ethnobotanical, morphological and linguistic data of 20 taro cultivars, as well as specific notes on abandoned landraces. These traditional varieties represent valuable genetic resources and can be instrumental in protecting taro from the genetic erosion caused by preference for yautia, and diseases such as the leaf blight. With this work, we call for renewed efforts to conserve this species and its landraces.

Taro (Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott) is a tropical plant of Asian origin, which is now extensiv... more Taro (Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott) is a tropical plant of Asian origin, which is now extensively cultivated in Africa, with Nigeria and Cameroon providing 60% of the worldwide production. Despite the economic role and long history of taro in Africa, there is no structured information available on the morphological diversity, cultivation, trade, culinary, and medicinal uses associated with this crop in Africa. This paper presents the results of a literature review of taro in Africa using the references stored in the Prelude database of African medicinal plants, to provide a more comprehensive picture of the current scientific knowledge on the utilization of this crop. Our results include information found in the African floras, published papers, as well as in the gray literature sources, and they show that taro is not only a food crop known under a large diversity of names that vary by region, but it is also widely used as a medicinal plant to cure human and animal diseases. The many local names applied to taro almost never have a correspondent morphological description in the literature. Combined genetic and ethnobotanical studies of this crop in Africa are needed to link cultivars to cultivation techniques, medicinal and culinary uses.

The domestication of plants and animals marks one of the most significant transitions in human, a... more The domestication of plants and animals marks one of the most significant transitions in human, and indeed global, history. Traditionally , study of the domestication process was the exclusive domain of archaeologists and agricultural scientists; today it is an increasingly multidisciplinary enterprise that has come to involve the skills of evolutionary biologists and geneticists. Although the application of new information sources and methodologies has dramatically transformed our ability to study and understand do-mestication, it has also generated increasingly large and complex datasets, the interpretation of which is not straightforward. In particular, challenges of equifinality, evolutionary variance, and emergence of unexpected or counter-intuitive patterns all face researchers attempting to infer past processes directly from patterns in data. We argue that explicit modeling approaches, drawing upon emerging methodologies in statistics and population genetics, provide a powerful means of addressing these limitations. Modeling also offers an approach to analyzing datasets that avoids conclusions steered by implicit biases, and makes possible the formal integration of different data types. Here we outline some of the modeling approaches most relevant to current problems in domes-tication research, and demonstrate the ways in which simulation modeling is beginning to reshape our understanding of the do-mestication process. model | inference | evolution | agriculture | Neolithic T he emergence of agriculture beginning some 10,000 y ago marked more than a change in human patterns of subsistence. The beginnings of food production ushered in an era of radically new relationships between humans and other species, dramatic new evolutionary pressures, and fundamental transformations to the earth's biosphere. The evolutionary process of plant and animal domestication by humans led to morphological, physiological, behavioral, and genetic differentiation of a wide range of species from their wild progenitors (1, 2). The selection pressures that were placed on such species continue today, sometimes through direct genetic modification, and both the processes and their outcomes are accordingly of significant broader interest. Domestication is also part of a cultural evolutionary process (3, 4), and some human genes have evolved in response to cultural innovations (5–8), much as the genes of domesticated species have changed under the impact of human artificial selection. The study of domestication today is a multidisciplinary enterprise in which archaeologists and agricultural scientists have been joined by evolutionary biologists and population geneticists (2, 9). At least five major sets of questions tend to reoccur in the domestication literature. The first three are demographic: (i) When, where, and in how many geographic locations was a given species domesticated? (ii) What were the dispersal routes from the original domestication centers? (iii) To what extent did hy-bridization between domesticates and local wild relatives occur? The remaining questions relate to adaptation: (iv) To what extent , and how rapidly, were domestic traits fixed? (v) How well did domesticates adapt to diverse anthropogenic environments? Most of these questions can be at least partially addressed using population genetic data from both ancient and modern samples. This is because variation across the genome is shaped by—and thus reflects—past demography, whereas genetic variation in and around particular genes determining key phenotypic traits is shaped by adaptation history. These principles, in combination with the availability of increasing quantities of ancient and modern genetic data, have led to a profusion of studies on particular domestication scenarios (e.g., refs. 10 and 11). However , the relationship between genetic data and the demographic or adaptation history that shaped it is noisy and often difficult to predict. This difficulty is primarily because: (i) in any evolving system that includes stochastic processes, patterns in genetic (or archaeological) data could have been generated under a range of Significance Our knowledge of the domestication of animal and plant species comes from a diverse range of disciplines, and interpretation of patterns in data from these disciplines has been the dominant paradigm in domestication research. However, such interpretations are easily steered by subjective biases that typically fail to account for the inherent randomness of evolutionary processes, and which can be blind to emergent patterns in data. The testing of explicit models using computer simulations, and the availability of powerful statistical techniques to fit models to observed data, provide a scientifically robust means of addressing these problems. Here we outline the principles and argue for the merits of such approaches in the context of domestication-related questions.

Azania: Archaeological Research in Africa, 2014

In: Ursula Thanheiser (ed.) News from the past, Progress in African archaeobotany. Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on African Archaeobotany in Vienna, 2 – 5 July 2012. Advances in Archaeobotany 3. Barkhuis: Groningen, 2016

Taro is an ancient crop native to Asia which is now found in all tropical and warm temperate regi... more Taro is an ancient crop native to Asia which is now found in all tropical and warm temperate regions of the world. Its present distribution is the result of a long history of use and translocation. Whilst in the Pacific much effort has been made to understand the role this plant played in prehistory, it has not received the same attention in Africa, even though it is a staple crop in some West African countries. recently, the retrieval of macro remains of dessicated taro at the Islamic port of Quseir al-Qadim in Egypt has revitalised the debate on the history of taro in Africa, and genetic has been initiated to reconstruct its introduction into the continent. Fieldwork and a genetic survey of taro in Africa was carried out as part of a project led by Dr Nicole Boivin (University of Oxford) and Dr Robin G. Allaby (University of Warwick). While analysis of the survey results is ongoing, a geographical and cultural appraisal of taro is presented here.

Helleria Ebner is a relict terrestrial isopod that is found only in a few delimited locations in ... more Helleria Ebner is a relict terrestrial isopod that is found only in a few delimited locations in the Mediterranean area. Analyses of 631 bp of the COI were used to investigate the phylogenetic relationships between 15 populations. In particular, trees were constructed using Maximum Parsimony (Branch and Bound method), and Neighbor Joining. The model of evolution was calculated with MODEL TEST (Posada et al., 1998), and results showed that Helleria populations found in Sardinia, Corsica, Tuscany and France underwent allopatric speciation in the last 20 million years. characterization of the first epimeral plate was also performed, and that indicated that this character can be used as morphological character for the inter population identification.