Scientists identify 'alien' flowering plant

On Aug 13, 2019, Ya Jidong, a botanist from the Kunming Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his colleagues walked into a patch of wet evergreen, broad-leaved forest in a karst valley in the Laoshan Provincial Nature Reserve in Malipo county, Yunnan province.

Working with the Germplasm Bank of Wild Species at the KIB, they were collecting germplasm materials from wild species, particularly seeds. By chance, they discovered a strange plant.

With a height of barely 4 centimeters above the ground, the tiny plant bore a striking resemblance to an "alien" due to its unique appearance.

"It looked more like a mushroom than a flowering plant, and it was something we had never seen before," Ya told China Daily.

They observed, measured and photographed the plant. As they walked a bit further, they found 10 more.

After returning to Kunming, capital of Yunnan, with the plant and conducting further studies, they found that the species is a member of the Thismia genus, which doesn't have green leaves and has eschewed photosynthesis in favor of a more unusual nutrient gathering process.

Thismia plants, commonly known as fairy lanterns, live entirely underground except for periods during the wet season, when their flowers rise above the soil.

"In the undergrowth of humid and dark forest, they only blossom for two or three weeks and then disappear," Ya said. "Even though we spent more than 100 days exploring the wild every year, we had never seen any Thismia species."