Taxonomic relationships:
Euonymus duanensis is similar to Euonymus
dielsianus but is easily distinguished by its smaller leaves and
reddish flowers. Further diagnostic morphological characters of the new
species and two related species are presented in Table 1.
Traditionally Euonymus was divided into 5 sections in
accordance with fruit characteristics (Cheng and Huang 1999), however,
recently phylogenetic study showed that only two sections (sect.Kalonymus and sect. Echinococcus ) were supported as
monophyly, and the relationships of other sections remains ambiguous (Li
2014, Li et al. 2014). Our phylogenetic results also confirmed the
complex relationship of the genus and found species from different
sections mixed (Fig. 4). For example, in morphology the new species,