Firstpost ·
Lost for 180 years, a rare Assam plant turns up on a single hillside
A doctoral student's field trip through the Jatinga Hills has ended nearly two centuries of silence around Rungia mastersii, an endemic shrub last seen by science in 1845. The find has thrilled botanists and worried them in equal measure.
In 1845, the British botanist J.W. Masters collected a small flowering shrub along Assam's Sundari river. The plant was later described as a new species and named in his honour. After that, it vanished from the record entirely. For 180 years, the only evidence it had ever existed was one dried specimen kept at the Central National Herbarium in Howrah.
According to a Mongabay India report, that changed this year, when Kangkan Kumar Das, a PhD scholar at Assam University, Silchar, was surveying the Acanthaceae family across the region for his doctoral work. While trekking through the Jatinga Hills in Dima Hasao district, he came across an unfamiliar shrub growing in a damp, rocky crevice beside a stream. Das consulted Yunfei Deng, a botanist at the South China Botanical Garden, who confirmed the identification.
