A Botanical 'Uproar' — New Plant Genus, Species Discovered in Texas

Thought Question: If you found a mysterious plant no one had ever seen before, what would you name it and why?

The devil, it seems, likes to hang out in Big Bend National Park in Texas.

No, the hikers who made the discovery in 2024 didn’t stumble upon a rift to the underworld. Instead, they found a tiny, fuzzy plant nestled among the rocks of the Chihuahuan Desert. Its bright yellow flowers and devil-like horns caught their eye. So, they uploaded a picture to a science-sharing app. They hoped experts could tell them what it was.

The thing is, nobody could. It had never been documented before. 

"That kind of caused an uproar," Isaac Lichter Marck told NPR. He's a researcher at the California Academy of Sciences. 

Soon, botanists swarmed to the little blooms like bees, trying to classify the plant. Its blossoms made up of many smaller flowers reminded some of a sunflower. But its leaves seemed more like the other succulents that thrived in the desert. Using its DNA and a microscope, experts found that the plant was not just a new species. It was a new genus.    

Lichter Marck’s team named the fluffy, horned plant Ovicula biradiata, or “wooly devil,” for its common name. They published their findings recently in the journal PhytoKeys. The team believes the wooly devil was hidden for so long because it only comes out after lots of rainfall in the desert. They say it was a lucky find. Climate change makes the desert hotter and drier. That means flowers like this one will become even less likely to bloom. 

"We probably are documenting a species that's on its way out," Lichter Marck told NPR. "There are countless other species that are probably not going to be recognized before they go extinct."  

Photo of the wooly devil from Big Bend National Park Service.