Background and aims – Pollination systems often reflect adaptations to specific groups of pollinators, and these morphological specialisations have been important in the diversification of the angiosperms. Here, we study the evolution of the capitulum and pollination system in the pantropical genus Parkia, which comprises 35 species of trees distributed largely in the forests of South and Central America, Africa, Madagascar, and the Indo-Pacific. The flowers are grouped into capitula that are composed of one, two, or three distinct morphological types, and are principally pollinated either by insects or by bats.

Material and methods – Using BEAST, we estimated the ages of nodes in a phylogeny based on four chloroplast regions (matK, trnL, psbA-trnH, and rps16-trnQ) and the nuclear region ITS/18S/26S. This analysis also enabled us to reconstruct the ancestral state of the capitulum and hence infer the ancestral pollination system. Euclidean distance-based cluster analysis was performed to determine which characters are consistently related to a specific pollination system.

Key results – Our results indicate that the ancestral capitulum in the genus had three types of flowers and a morphology associated with bat-pollination in both the Paleotropics and Neotropics. In one derived Neotropical clade, the number of floral types in each capitulum was reduced to two (capitulum also bat-pollinated) or one (insect-pollinated). Thus, entomophily, as seen in some Neotropical species of Parkia, has been derived from a bat-pollinated ancestor. Cluster analysis showed that the floral characters were mostly consistent with pollination systems.

Conclusion – Chiropterophily is not an evolutionary dead end in Parkia because during the evolutionary history of the genus there has been at least one transition to entomophily. Parkia provides a unique example of evolutionary transitions from chiropterophily to entomophily in a pantropical genus of trees.