By Timothy A. Schuler
| PLANTS |
It’s not every day that park rangers identify a wholly new genus of plant. In fact, the last time was in 1976, when a botanist at Death Valley National Park first described Dedeckera eurekensis, a matting shrub that grows amid the rocky outcrops of the Mojave Desert. The discovery of Ovicula biradiata, a small, fuzzy new member of the sunflower family, was officially identified in the journal PhytoKeys earlier this year, marking a momentous occasion for botanists and national park enthusiasts alike. “It was like, an entire new genus of plants? That’s crazy,” says Kelsey Wogan, a biologist at Sul Ross State University who coauthored the study.
First documented near an area of Big Bend National Park in Texas known as Devil’s Den, the tiny annual is commonly known as wooly devil on account of the white trichomes that cover its leaves, giving the flowering plant its velvety appearance and providing protection from harsh wind and sun. A team, including the longtime Texas botanist A. Michael Powell and the evolutionary biologist Isaac Lichter Marck, compared the collected specimens to close relatives and “found strong support for this new plant falling outside of any of the recognized genera, which meant that we actually needed to create a completely new genus,” Lichter Marck says.
Only three populations of Ovicula—whose Latin name is a nod to another endangered Big Bend resident, the bighorn sheep—have been documented, all in Big Bend National Park. Wogan says it’s a miracle the ephemeral species was found at all. “The biggest [specimen] we found was seven centimeters across,” she says. “That’s the length of a Fun Size Snickers.”
Timothy A. Schuler is a contributing editor at the magazine. His writing has appeared in Metropolis, Bloomberg CityLab, and Places Journal, among others.
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