For a tropical wildflower first described by scientists in 2000, the scientific name "extinctus" is a warning. The orange wildflower was discovered 15 years ago in a forest in Ecuador that was later largely destroyed, and the scientists who named it suspected that by the time they named it, it was extinct. But in a new paper on PhytoKeys, the researchers reported seeing extinctus for the first time in 40 years.
The rediscovered plant is a small woodland dweller with brilliant neon-colored flowers. Their flowers have a large bag at the bottom with a small opening on top where pollinators can enter and leave. Extinctus was found at the foot of the Andes Mountains, where the land was flat into a flat surface and was once covered by a cloud forest. Known as the Centinela Ridge, this area is home to a unique array of plants that disappeared when the forest was almost completely destroyed in the 1980s. The late biologist E.O. Wilson even named the phenomenon of the creature's immediate extinction when its small habitat was destroyed as the "Centinela extinction."
Extinctus, long thought to be extinct, was found growing next to a waterfall in Bosque y Cascada Las Rocas, a private reserve off the coast of Ecuador with a large collection of endangered plants. Centinela's story is also a wake-up call, drawing attention to the fact that more than 97 percent of Ecuador's western half of the forest has been cut down and converted to farmland.
For tropical botanists, Centinela is a fabulous place. However, since it is described by the top people in the field, no one really scrutinizes it. No one went back to confirm that the forest had disappeared and that those things were extinct. Since 2009, some scientists have conducted expeditions looking for the existence of extinctus, but they have not been successful.
Starting in the summer of 2021, they began combing through satellite imagery in an attempt to find the still-intact pristine rainforest and assembled a team of ten botanists from six different institutions in Ecuador, the United States and France, who arrived at Centinela in November 2021 and found extinctus in the first few hours of their first day of searching.
The researchers took pictures and collected some fallen flowers that they didn't want to harm if they were the only remaining plants on Earth. They sent the photos to taxonomist John Clark, who confirmed that the flowers were extinctus that had not yet become extinctus. Thankfully, the team found more individuals when visiting other forests, collecting museum specimens to prove the discovery and collecting leaves for DNA analysis.