: Out to solve a 180-year-old puzzle, scientists rediscover Maharashtra’s first endemic tree #IndiaNEWS While working on a project to document Maharashtra’s endemic species, researchers from the

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Out to solve a 180-year-old puzzle, scientists rediscover Maharashtra’s first endemic tree #IndiaNEWS
While working on a project to document Maharashtra’s endemic species, researchers from the Naoroji Godrej Centre for Plant Research came across a unique tree that they had never seen before. After an 8-km trek from Khireshwar to the Harishchandragad Hill in the northern Western Ghats, they saw a small population of 15-feet-high trees with bifarious leaves, where the leaves grow on opposite sides of a branch in two vertical rows.The trees, located next to a perennial stream, were flanked by rock boulders and had the thick canopy of the semi-evergreen forest of the Kalsubai Harishchandragad Wildlife Sanctuary above them. Initially, the researchers believed these trees were Croton lawianus, a species described by British botanist JD Hooker in 1887. But further studies revealed the species to be Croton gibsonianus, described by another British botanist Joseph Nimmo in 1839, based on the field samples collected by Alexander Gibson, the first Forest Conservator of Bombay Presidency.Entirely new speciesMorphological studies, examining literature, and subsequent visits to the Western Ghats in Maharashtra and Karnataka revealed that Joseph Nimmo had described two species in 1839: Croton gibsonianus from Harishchandragad and Croton lawianus from Bhimashankar in the Western Ghats. In 1887, JD Hooker had apparently made a mistake in labelling herbarium sheets which led to Croton gibsonianus being mislabelled as Croton lawianus, and...Read more

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