Abílio Fernandes

Who is Abílio Fernandes?

Abílio Fernandes, was a Portuguese botanist and taxonomist from the Botanical Institute at the University of Coimbra and a student of Aurélio Quintanilha, botanist and geneticist. He is noted for his work on Amaryllidaceae, and compiling floras of Portugal, Macaronesia and Tropical Africa. He was the son of José Fernandes and Maria Augusta Fernandes and is denoted by the author abbreviation A.Fern. when citing a botanical name.

Fernandes was Quintanilha’s student during the academic year 1926-27 and was invited to become teaching assistant in 1927. He became interested in the number and form of chromosomes in different species, later specialising in cyto-systematics, founding and becoming head of a research programme on cytotaxonomy at the University of Coimbra, where he stayed for the remainder of his career. Quintanilha stated that Fernandes’s earliest works – including his thesis published in 1930, Study on the chromosomes of Liláceas and Amarilidáceas – are the first published in Portugal in which chromosomes were regarded as “carriers of the heritable characters”, representing thus “the beginning of a new branch of science among us, cytogenetics”