A flower once thought to be extinct is no longer pushing up daisies, unexpectedly reemerging after almost 40 years.
The orange-petaled flower, named Gasteranthus extinctus, was found when a team of scientists visited the Centinela Ridge in Ecuador in November 2021, according to a scientific article published Friday. To avoid damaging what remained of the plants, photos of the flowers were sent to a taxonomic expert who confirmed the flowers were the not-so-extinct G. extinctus, according to a press release from the Field Museum.
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“Rediscovering this flower shows that it’s not too late to turn around even the worst-case biodiversity scenarios, and it shows that there’s value in conserving even the smallest, most degraded areas,” said Dawson White, a postdoctoral researcher at Chicago’s Field Museum and co-author of the paper on G. extinctus. “It’s an important piece of evidence that it’s not too late to be exploring and inventorying plants and animals in the heavily degraded forests of western Ecuador.”
G. extinctus was first discovered in 1985 but did not receive its name until 2000, with the “extinctus” serving as a warning of the flower’s precarious situation. The flower will keep its name due to the strict renaming rules in biology‘s code of nomenclature.
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While no longer considered extinct, the flower remains highly endangered. Ecuadorian conservationists are currently working with the scientists to protect some of the remaining fragments of the plant.
