A volunteer spotted the tiny fluffy plant with maroon inflorescences while exploring the northern corner of Big Bend National Park in Texas.
Last spring, Deb Manley was exploring a remote area of Big Bend National Park when she noticed something unusual on the ground. Tiny, fuzzy, flowering plants were sprouting between the desert rocks in the northern part of the Texas park. She had never seen anything like it before.
Manley, who volunteers with the park's botany program, took some photos and uploaded them to the iNaturalist platform to see if anyone else could identify the mysterious plant. She alerted park staff, who were also unfamiliar with the tufted white foliage and burgundy inflorescences.
That's when Manley and the research team set out to find the find. After studying species databases, herbarium records and publications on plant taxonomy, they realized that they had stumbled upon a species that was previously unknown to scientists.
The researchers described the new species, which they named Ovicula biradiata, in a new paper published in mid-February 2025 in the journal PhytoKeys.
Ovicula biradiata is not only a new species, because the plant is so different from the others that researchers have classified it as an entirely new genus in the Asteraceae family.
The finding was the first time a new plant genus had been identified in a U.S. national park in nearly five decades, the California Academy of Sciences, which supported the discovery, said in a statement.
The last new plant genus discovered in a national park was July goldenseal or July goldenseal (Dedeckera eurekensis), found in Death Valley National Park in 1976.
"Now that the species has been identified and named, we have so much more to learn about it," Anjna O'Connor, superintendent of Big Bend National Park, said in a National Park Service statement. "I can't wait to find out if there are other populations in the park, details of the plant's life cycle, its pollinators, and because of the current drought, whether it will even be observed this spring."
The plant's Latin name comes from its appearance. "Ovicula" means "tiny sheep," a reference to the desert bighorn sheep that inhabit the park, as well as the thick, white, fluffy "wool" that covers the plant's leaves. The second part of the name, "biradiata," is a reference to the two petals that make up each flower.
Photo: smithsonianmag.com
As for an easier-to-remember nickname? The researchers settled on "woolly devil" because a pair of the plant's petals resemble horns and it was found near a tourist area known as the Devil's Den.
The woolly devil is what botanists call a "belly plant," or a tiny, low-growing plant that is best seen when it is lying on the ground. It measures no more than 8 centimeters across, and it often blends in with the surrounding gravel.
This particular plant blooms only after rain, which doesn't happen very often in its harsh, arid habitat.
"Plants that thrive in deserts are often quite unique; they have evolved special mechanisms to withstand the extreme conditions of drought and flood in these arid landscapes, from water storage structures to rapid life cycles triggered by rain," said study co-author Isaac Lichter Mark, an ecologist at the California Academy of Sciences.
"Woolly Devil" grows near drought-tolerant plants, including Ocotillo shrub, Echinocactus or hedgehog cactus and creosote bush. But so far, researchers have found it only in three narrow spots in the north corner of the park. They are concerned that they have just discovered a species that is "
already on its way to extinction" as the deserts are getting hotter and drier due to
climate change.
The researchers are also interested in the plant's potential medicinal properties. Looking at it under a microscope, they noticed glands found in other members of the Compositae family that are known to have anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory properties.
Not surprisingly, the previously unknown species was discovered within Big Bend National Park, which covers about 801,200 acres in the Chihuahuan Desert and boasts "exceptional biodiversity," according to a statement from the National Park Service.
Big Bend is home to a variety of habitats, from high elevation forested areas on the sky islands to low desert Bajadas (composed of a series of merging alluvial fans along the mountainside) and natural riverine ecosystems.
Elsewhere in the park, scientists have previously discovered fossilized remains of a new species of dinosaur, Malefica deckerti. They also rediscovered a species of oak tree once thought to be extinct, Quercus tardifolia.