![]() While attempts to de-extinct the dodo, the woolly mammoth, and other charismatic megafauna continue to grab headlines, they would result at best in a hybrid, genetically engineered animal - a proxy of an extinct species. During the past century, however, the forests of Moloka’i have been overrun by introduced invasive plants and animals, and the species has never been seen again. The species once perched on other plants and derived its moisture and nutrients from the air, rain, or debris that accumulated around it. In 1928, botanist Otto Degener plucked the plant from moist, shaded slopes on the spectacular eastern end of the Hawaiian island Moloka’i, home of the world’s highest sea cliffs. In the words of McKenna Santiago Coyle, who showcased 16 extinct plants in an online gallery on the NYBG herbarium website, these specimens “are remarkable glimpses into the past, capturing a moment before something tragic happened.” For example, proposed de-extinction candidate Degener’s peperomia, Peperomia degeneri, is an evolutionarily unique member of the pepper family known from a single collection. At the same time, scientists have been refining in vitro embryo rescue techniques, increasing the odds that old or weak seed embryos can grow into viable plants. Data aggregators such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility provide researchers looking for seeds with instant access to millions of scanned specimens, along with associated “metadata” such as the GPS coordinates where the plants were collected. New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), for example, began digitizing its herbarium specimens in the mid-1990s, and today some 4 million, or about half of its preserved plants, have been scanned and can now be called up on a computer screen by anyone around the globe. Abby Meyer, executive director of Botanic Gardens Conservation International in the United States, points to the rise in recent decades of the field of bioinformatics, which has transformed the trove of biodiversity information once locked up in natural history collections - such as herbarium specimens of extinct plants that contain seeds - into browsable digital databases. While herbarium specimens with seeds have been available for centuries, botanists only now are realizing their potential to resurrect life forms believed lost forever. ![]() “When a plant goes extinct,” says Giulia Albani Rocchetti, a postdoctoral researcher at Roma Tre University and the lead author of the paper, “we don’t just lose a species, we lose a member of a habitat community with a specific role and relations with other species we lose millennia of evolution and adaptation we lose genes which could have provided insight into the species and its community and yielded new pharmacological compounds and other products.” If the species can be brought back to life, there is a chance that all of that can be recovered. Many of these plants are so-called “edge” species that represent a unique evolutionary lineage that has been lost. In Nature Plants in December, an international group of biologists published the first-ever list of globally extinct plants they believe can be returned from the dead, using seeds available in herbarium specimens. Now these vast botanical libraries are being tapped to try to create a new chapter in the 500-million-year history of Earth’s terrestrial plant life. Today, the 254-year-old specimen is among the almost 8 million preserved plants in New York Botanical Garden’s William & Lynda Steere Herbarium.įor nearly five centuries, herbaria have helped botanists identify, name, and classify the world’s floral diversity. The plant was dried and pressed for future study. Later named Chiliotrichum amelloides, it is one of a thousand plant species unknown to European scientists that the two men collected during Captain Cook’s first voyage on the HMS Endeavor, braving treacherous seas and inhospitable landscapes to document every plant they encountered as they circumnavigated the globe. ![]() In January 1769, botanists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander found a daisy in Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of South America. ![]()
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