Although POWO does list Lantana urticoides as "Lantana × urticoides", by doing so they are themselves overriding Roger Sanders, whose work is widely accepted as the current authority on the genus Lantana worldwide. Sanders speculates that L. urticoides likely originated by hybridization between L. hirsuta and L. kingii, but that it has long since been a full legitimate species of its own, no less legitimate than any other Lantana species (and it has historically always been widely accepted at species level). Hybridization is a tremendous driver of the speciation of life on Earth, but after time passes and the new species survives and stabilizes, reproducing itself reliably true-to-form in its environment over the longterm, it is no longer considered a hybrid but instead its own species.