Class : Dicotyledons
Order : Magnoliales
Family : Magnoliaceae
Genus : Magnolia
Species : Magnolia rzedowskiana
Photographs on the Arkive website have helped two naturalists who had never met and work around 200 miles apart to identify two previously unrecorded species of one of Earth’s oldest flowering plants: the Magnolia. In 2010, Roberto Pedraza Ruiz gave Arkive a series of animal and plant photos he had taken in a life-rich cloud forest within eastern Mexico’s Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve. One of the photos he donated was identified as being the magnolia, Magnolia dealbata, classified as Endangered on the IUCN Red List.
But the image raised questions for Dr José Antonio Vázquez, a botanist at the University of Guadalajara, when he came across it during a search of Arkive’s 16,000 free-to-view online flora and fauna fact-files. It was this image that first raised questions. It is now identified as a Magnolia rzedowskiana flower. The first of the finds, originally identified on Arkive, has already been documented and has been given the name Magnolia rzedowskiana, after Dr Jerzy Rzedoswski, Mexico’s most eminent botanist who has collected and documented over 50,000 species and celebrating his 90th birthday this year. A description of the second specimen is about to published and will be named Magnolia pedrazae, after Roberto.
These discoveries highlight the importance of protecting sites with high biological value, giving ecosystems and species refuges from human activity, spaces where they are protected from humans’ ever-increasing demands for land and ecosystem services. If steps had not been taken to protect them, these species and others may have disappeared before we even learned of their existence.
Link to Original Paper: http://www.scielo.org
Website: http://blog.arkive.org
great
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