In January 1769, botanists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander found a daisy in Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America. Later named Chiliotrichum amelloides, it is one of a thousand plant species unknown to European scientists that the two men collected during Captain Cook’s first voyage on the HMS Endeavor, braving treacherous seas and inhospitable landscapes to document every plant they encountered as they circumnavigated the globe. The plant was dried and pressed for future study. Today, the 254-year-old specimen is among the almost 8 million preserved plants in New York Botanical Garden’s William & Lynda Steere Herbarium.
For nearly five centuries, herbaria have helped botanists identify, name, and classify the world’s floral diversity. Now these vast botanical libraries are being tapped to try to create a new chapter in the 500-million-year history of Earth’s terrestrial plant life. In Nature Plants in December, an international group of biologists published the first-ever list of globally extinct plants they believe can be returned from the dead, using seeds available in herbarium specimens. Many of these plants are so-called “edge” species that represent a unique evolutionary lineage that has been lost.
“When a plant goes extinct,” says Giulia Albani Rocchetti, a postdoctoral researcher at Roma Tre University and the lead author of the paper, “we don’t just lose a species, we lose a member of a habitat community with a specific role and relations with other species; we lose millennia of evolution and adaptation; we lose genes which could have provided insight into the species and its community and yielded new pharmacological compounds and other products.” If the species can be brought back to life, there is a chance that all of that can be recovered.
Read more at Yale Environment 360
Image: A branch of Blutaparon rigidum, collected on a 1905-1906 expedition to the Galapagos Islands, contains hundreds of potentially viable seeds. (Credit: NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN via Yale Environment 360)