A plant once thought to be extinct has been rediscovered in the Australian wilderness
A simple upload of a photo to the internet set off an incredible chain of events in Australian science, bringing a unique species of shrub back from the brink of extinction.
User Aaron Bean’s observations on the iNaturalist platform caught the attention of botanist Anthony Bean from the Queensland Herbarium.
The scientist recognized $Ptilotus$ $senarius$ in the photos—a rare plant that had not been documented since 1967 and was considered extinct in the wild.
What makes this discovery even more remarkable is that Anthony Bean himself had described this species ten years before its rediscovery. The long-lost shrub grows exclusively in rugged terrain near the Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia.
Scientists believed that this plant, with its purple-pink flowers, had permanently joined the sad list of about 900 species that have disappeared from the planet since the 1750s.
Thanks to the efforts of the discoverers and the landowner, researchers confirmed the species’ existence.
They officially reclassified the shrub from extinct to endangered, granting it legal protection.
Australia’s vast size and the fact that one-third of the land is privately owned complicate the work of botanists, so online databases have become an indispensable tool for documenting biodiversity.
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