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Lost Wildflower Named 'Extinctus' Rediscovered, Still Endangered

A beauty of a flower isn't gone... yet.

Amanda Kooser
Freelance writer Amanda C. Kooser covers gadgets and tech news with a twist for CNET. When not wallowing in weird gear and iPad apps for cats, she can be found tinkering with her 1956 DeSoto.
Amanda Kooser
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Gasteranthus extinctus has bright orange flowers. The plant was thought for decades to be extinct, but was rediscovered in late 2021.

Riley Fortier

When you name a plant "extinctus," you are making a statement, one that implies a loss of hope. Gasteranthus extinctus is the eye-catching name given to a tropical wildflower from South America that was first described in 2000. The wildflower, thought to be long gone, has been rediscovered.

The researchers had good reason for the name at the time. "The orange wildflower had been found 15 years earlier in an Ecuadorian forest that had since been largely destroyed; the scientists who named it suspected that by the time they named it, it was already extinct," the Field Museum in Chicago said in a statement on Friday.

A team of researchers went on an expedition in 2021 to the Centinela Ridge region in Ecuador, an area that suffered extreme deforestation in the 1980s. It's now mostly covered by crops, primarily bananas. Previous expeditions that went in search of the flower were unsuccessful, but this group of botanists found G. extinctus in the remnants of a forest. 

"We didn't have a photo to compare it to, we only had images of dried herbarium specimens, a line drawing, and a written description, but we were pretty sure that we'd found it based on its poky little hairs and showy 'pot-bellied' flowers," said Field Museum ecologist Nigel Pitman, lead author of a paper on the rediscovered species published in the journal PhytoKeys, on Friday. 

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Gasteranthus extinctus still grows in remnants of what was once a broad forest area in Ecuador.

Riley Fortier

The rediscovery of the plant is good news, but any sense of celebration has to be balanced by the difficult realities of the wildflower's threatened environment. The study describes the species as critically endangered.

The researchers offered a "measure of optimism regarding the plant's conservation prospects." There is hope it may grow in some protected areas. However, the team cautioned that the flower's striking appearance could attract commercial plant collectors, potentially putting it at risk of unsustainable harvesting. The team is working with conservationists in Ecuador to protect some of the remaining areas of the Centinelan region where the species lives. 

Gasteranthus extinctus will be keeping its name. Said study co-author Dawson White, "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."