''Calocephalus platycephalus'' commonly known as western beauty-heads or yellow top, is a species of flowering plant in the family

Asteraceae The family Asteraceae, alternatively Compositae, consists of over 32,000 known species of flowering plants in over 1,900 genera within the order Asterales. Commonly referred to as the aster, daisy, composite, or sunflower family, Compositae w ...

. It is an upright to sprawling herb with white hairy foliage and yellow ball-shaped flower heads and is

endemic Endemism is the state of a species being found in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also found elsew ...

to Australia.

Description

''Calocephalus platycephalus'' is a herb with upright to ascending, whitish woolly to hairy branches and about high. The leaves are arranged alternately, linear to lance-shaped, mostly long, wide, more or less smooth to hairy, apex blunt to occasionally ending in a short triangular point in the upper leaves. The flower heads are yellow, broadly rounded to globe-shaped and 17-22

bract In botany, a bract is a modified or specialized leaf, especially one associated with a reproductive structure such as a flower, inflorescence axis or cone scale. Bracts are usually different from foliage leaves. They may be smaller, larger, or of ...

s. Flowering occurs mainly from spring to summer and the fruit is a bristly

achene An achene (; ), also sometimes called akene and occasionally achenium or achenocarp, is a type of simple dry fruit produced by many species of flowering plants. Achenes are monocarpellate (formed from one carpel) and indehiscent (they do not ope ...

long.

Taxonomy and naming

This species was described in 1867 by

Ferdinand von Mueller Baron Sir Ferdinand Jacob Heinrich von Mueller, (german: Müller; 30 June 1825 – 10 October 1896) was a German-Australian physician, geographer, and most notably, a botanist. He was appointed government botanist for the then colony of Vict ...

who gave it the name ''Pachysurus platycephalus''. In 1867

George Bentham George Bentham (22 September 1800 – 10 September 1884) was an English botanist, described by the weed botanist Duane Isely as "the premier systematic botanist of the nineteenth century". Born into a distinguished family, he initially studi ...

changed the name to ''Calocephalus platycephalus'' and the description was published in ''

Flora Australiensis ''Flora Australiensis: a description of the plants of the Australian Territory'', more commonly referred to as ''Flora Australiensis'', and also known by its standard abbreviation ''Fl. Austral.'', is a seven-volume flora of Australia published be ...

''.The

specific epithet In taxonomy, binomial nomenclature ("two-term naming system"), also called nomenclature ("two-name naming system") or binary nomenclature, is a formal system of naming species of living things by giving each a name composed of two parts, bot ...

(''platycephalus'') means "headed".

Distribution and habitat

Western beauty-heads grows in sandy and sometimes semi-salines locations in New South Wales, South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q15554710 Gnaphalieae Asterales of Australia Flora of New South Wales Flora of South Australia Flora of Queensland Flora of the Northern Territory Flora of Western Australia