Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Maçainhas, Guarda District, Portugal
About Abílio Fernandes
- Abílio Fernandes (19 October 1906 Guarda, Portugal - 16 October 1994 Coimbra), was a Portuguese botanist and taxonomist from the Botanical Institute at the University of Coimbra and a student of Aurélio Quintanilha (1892–1987), 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 (1880-) and Maria Augusta Fernandes (1880-) 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” Abílio Fernandes was married to the botanist Rosette Mercedes Saraiva Batarda (1 October 1916 – 28 May 2005) and had 2 sons Eduardo Manuel Batarda Fernandes (1943) and José António Batarda Fernandes (1946).
- Some of her work was published in Flora Zambesiaca and she did a taxonomic revision of the families Avicenniaceae, Verbenaceae and Lamiaceae.
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