Among Flowering Plants, Thousands of Evolutionary Oddities at Risk of Extinction

A new study identifies thousands of flowering plants belonging to rare and ancient lineages that are in urgent need of protection.

These research focuses on species with few surviving relatives, such as the ginkgo tree, which is believed to be the last remaining member of a line that goes back more than 300 million years. The ginkgo occupies a long and isolated branch of the tree of life. If it were to go extinct, scientists say, a significant part of evolutionary history would be lost.

For the research, scientists evaluated each species of flowering plant — of which there are more than 330,000 — to determine its distinctiveness and its risk of extinction. For plants that had not been formally assessed, they used computer modeling to determine its level of vulnerability.

From this, scientists determined that more than 20 percent of the evolutionary history of flowering plants is at risk of being eradicated. The research, published in the journal Science, identified nearly 10,000 species that should be prioritized for conservation given their unique and threatened evolutionary history.

Species most in need of conservation include the infamously smelly “corpse flower” of Sumatra, the “jellyfish tree” of the Seychelles, and the “salad plant” of Saint Helena, a tiny island in the South Atlantic.

Scientists note that many rare and threatened species may ultimately prove highly useful to humans. “When we talk about [distinctive] species as ‘weird and wonderful’ we tend to think of their physical characteristics, whether that’s their bizarre, jellyfish-shaped flowers, or their sheer size, but it also includes the things we can’t see — their molecules, chemicals, and other properties that we as humans depend on,” said coauthor Matilda Brown, a researcher at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

She said that “losing a deep branch of the tree of life means the potential loss of the next breakthrough cancer drug or antibiotic, with no second chance.”

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