A mistake made by a British botanist who sailed to Australia to collect and name plants has been corrected 200 years after it was made. The discovery has prompted a confession by modern experts that there are probably dozens of similar errors yet to be discovered.
“It happens a lot. Typically, there’s not a 200-year window until someone figures it out,” plant expert Tony Bean told Yahoo News.
Bean became aware of the problem while examining a species of common flowering shrub that grows in the forests of Queensland and New South Wales. He discovered that in 1810, when the plant was described, samples collected from one species were accidentally given two names.
After reviewing historical records, he is confident he knows why the mistake was made and has published a long-overdue correction in the Australian Journal of Taxonomy in June 2024.
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Why an Australian botanist became suspicious of plant descriptions
The error occurred in 1810 when the Scotsman Robert Brown described seven new species of the Leucopogon family in the Sydney area, all of whom look extremely alike.
But 204 years later, when Bean re-examined Brown’s records, he found something “suspicious” about one of the seven… Leucopogon biflorus. “There are no other records of it growing anywhere near Sydney,” he said, adding that the nearest case was 400 kilometres away near Dubbo.
Concerned by the anomaly, Bean set out to find an image of Brown’s specimen, preserved in the vaults of the Natural History Museum in London. He was shocked to discover that his description of the plant and a high-resolution image of the plant Brown was studying did not match.
“It’s been puzzling why someone didn’t discover it before. I guess it’s easier to find images online now. Ten or twenty years ago those images weren’t available and you had to borrow the physical specimen and have it shipped from London or Paris,” Bean concluded.
Why was the plant given the wrong name?
The original Leucopogon biflorus The specimens collected in 1810, known in biology as a “holotype” or “type,” clearly came from the same plant species that Brown called Leucopogon setiger. Bean is pretty sure he knows why Brown’s mix-up occurred.
“In this case, the type of Leucopogon setiger “It only had immature flowers, just the buds. And I think it was taken from a fairly young plant, perhaps in its first bloom,” he said.
“While the type of Leucopogon biflorus “It was good quality, had full flowers and mature foliage. That’s why I think the mistake was made in the first place.”
Does Leucopogon biflorus really exist?
In the following decades, other botanists applied the name Leucopogon biflorus and its synonym Stifelia biflora to plant specimens they found outside Sydney, even as far north-west across the Liverpool Plains.
And to botanists, the two plants look nothing alike: Bean noticed differences in the leaves, stems and flowers. “It’s like night and day,” he said.
This meant that Bean could not solve Brown’s error simply by combining Leucopogon biflorus and Leucopogon setiger in one. “The species that has been recognized for many years under the name Leucopogon biflorus “It’s different and deserves recognition,” Bean wrote in his article.
And as our understanding of plants has improved over the past 200 years, Bean realized he couldn’t keep the name. Leucopogon biflorus because it was now understood to belong to a different gender.
To solve the problem, Bean has given it a new name very different from the Leucopogon setiger and is unlikely to be confused again. Styphelia sparsa.
Bean is a senior botanist at the Queensland Herbarium in Brisbane, his paper was published under the title The demise of Styphelia biflora.
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