In March 2024, Deb Manley—a volunteer walking the rugged backcountry of Big Bend National Park after a recent rain—noticed tiny, strange flowers among the limestone scree. The little plants clung to the dirt like tufts of dryer lint, with minuscule flowers and a pair of long, maroon petals that stuck up like devil’s horns.
Fascinated, Manley uploaded pictures onto iNaturalist, a community biodiversity site. The discovery—named the “wooly devil” (Ovicula biradiata) by an international team of botanists in a Feb. 18 paper in the science journal PhytoKeys—came as a shock.
“It doesn’t happen very often that we find something with this level of uniqueness,” says Isaac Lichter Marck, a botanist with the California Academy of Scientists and an author on the paper. While new species are a fairly common discovery, he added, finding a new genus—the taxonomic group above species—is much rarer. The last time a new plant genus was discovered in a national park was 1976.
The wooly devil wasn’t just the first discovery of a new genus and species of plant in a U.S National Park in almost half a century: researchers also found that it was a bizarre new form of sunflower. The sunflower family contains over 30,000 species, and is one of the most diverse families of flowering plants in America: containing not just familiar species like the invasive domesticated sunflower, but also a dizzying amount of native species that have evolved to survive on rock cliffs, sand dunes, and deserts. “They contain a lot of species that live in challenging places, which have come up with strategies to do that which are unique,” Lichter Marck says.
Many sunflowers are hard to miss. But the wooly devil is difficult to see even when it’s blooming, Lichter Marck says. Its fuzzy exterior helps it blend with the surrounding chips of limestone in the lowland desert soils where it grows. The plant is overshadowed by other desert plants, like creosote and hedgehog cactus. And the plant only blooms after rare desert rains.
“A lot of people might assume that desert organisms are the most equipped to deal with harsh conditions,” Lichter Marck says. But ephemeral plants like the wooly devil rely heavily on occasional rainstorms, which have gotten more rare over the years. Since they’re already living on the margins, they’re actually much more sensitive to environmental changes. Even now, the flower hasn’t been spotted sprouting in the park.
The discovery—carried out by “team wooly,” which included Lichter Marck as well as staff from Big Bend National Park, Sul Ross State University, and Centro Interdisciplinario de Investigación para el Desarrollo Integral Regional—is just the first step for understanding the fuzzy little sunflower. Researchers now need to carry out an in-depth study of its population, figure out how widespread it is, and learn more about how it reproduces in an effort to see how threatened it might be. “The ideal would be for the national park to remain in perpetuity a place where plants like this can not only exist, but where we can continue learning about all of these plants as they’re undergoing all of these changes,” Lichter Marck says.
“There may be lots of different things that may be going extinct without being recognized. We’re losing these things that are very unique before they’re ever even given a name,” he adds. “Hopefully finds like this help people get inspired to learn about biodiversity and go look around and help us learn about native flora.”
