“…Even characters once thought to be useful in delimiting natural groups within the genus, such as habitat (Engelmann, 1882) or megaspore morphology (Pfeiffer, 1922), have been found to be labile (Cox and Hickey, 1984;Taylor and Hickey, 1992;Budke et al, 2005;Hickey, 2007;Bagella et al, 2011). And while some characters such as the glossopodium (the portion of the ligule internal to the leaf) have shown some potential (Sharma and Singh, 1984;Pant et al, 2000;Shaw and Hickey, 2005;Singh et al, 2010;Freund, 2016), actually examining and interpreting these structures requires considerable histological and computational effort, making them ill-suited for field identification. This absence of consistent, dependable characters creates a paradox: the lack of reliable traits impedes the inference of phylogenies or classifications in the genus, but without a phylogeny, examining character evolution is exceptionally difficult.…”