According to a paper published on Monday in the journal Frontiers in Plant Science, researchers discovered a new waterlily species in London's Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, for the first time in over a century.
The new species, Victoria boliviana, has been in Kew's Herbarium for 177 years and was previously thought to be Victoria amazonica, the species named after Queen Victoria in 1837. Victoria boliviana is native to Bolivia and has leaves 3 metres (nearly 10 feet) wide, making it the world's largest waterlily species.
"In the face of a fast rate of biodiversity loss, describing new species is a task of fundamental importance; we hope that our multidisciplinary framework might inspire other researchers who are seeking approaches to rapidly and robustly identify new species," Natalia Przelomska, a biodiversity genomics researcher, said in a news release.
Carlos Magdalena, Kew's scientific and botanical research horticulturist, Lucy Smith, a freelance Kew botanical artist, and Przelomska had long suspected that the giant waterlily in Kew Herbarium was a distinct species from the other two in the genus, Victoria Amazonica and Victoria Cruziana.
Magdalena germinated and grew waterlily seeds from the suspected third species in 2016, thanks to donations from Bolivian institutions Santa Cruz de La Sierra Botanic Garden and La Rinconada Gardens. He then compared their development to that of seeds from the other two species.