A weird underground plant has been rediscovered after 151 years

Lost for a century and a half

Lost for a century and a half

Sochor et al, 2018

A peculiar plant has been found in the rainforests of Borneo after having been lost for over 150 years.

Thismia neptunis was discovered in 1866 by the Italian botanist Odoardo Beccari in the Gunung Matang massif in western Sarawak, Malaysia. He formally described it a few years later. There are no records of anyone seeing it since, so it was assumed extinct.

But in January 2017, Michal Sochor of the Crop Research Institute in Olomouc, Czech Republic and his colleagues found a few specimens …