In 2020, a group of botanists and members of the Indigenous Banao community were macheting their way through a rainforest in the Philippines in search of a rare flower called Rafflesia banaoana. Just a few hours after setting off, however, they stumbled upon a plant they hadn’t planned on finding: a vine with purple-spotted white tubular flowers with tufts of hair within them. “We came across the plant quite unexpectedly — it was hanging from the vegetation above our heads,” Chris Thorogood, head of science at the University of Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum, U.K., told Mongabay by email. “We took a specimen, and when we reached the river so had more light, we stopped to examine it. It was clear to us then that it was new.” Eventually, Thorogood and his colleagues, Jayson Mansibang, Adriane Tobias and Pastor Malabrigo Jr. from the University of the Philippines Los Baños, confirmed that the plant, a species of the genus Aeschynanthus, referred to as lipstick vines, was indeed new to science. In a new paper, the botanists have named it Aeschynanthus pentatrichomatus, after the five tufts of hairs deep within the tubes of the flowers. “Penta” in Latin means five and “trichomatus” refers to trichomes or hair-like growths. The botanists found the plant while on an expedition into the remote Balbalasang rainforest on the northern Philippine island of Luzon. The expedition was led by men from the Indigenous Banao community. “We wouldn’t have been able to visit the forest without them,” Thorogood…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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