A poisonous mushroom collected at London Heathrow Airport, next to a particularly ugly orchid, top the list of 156 new plants and fungi from Kew Botanical Gardens worldwide in 2020.
In fact, a third of the new species are orchids; and a total of 19 orchids were found on the island of New Guinea. In the following photo you can see an image of what is considered "the ugliest orchid in the world."
Other findings
Six new species of webcap toadstool fungi have been named in the UK this year, including Cortinarius heatherae (pictured at the top of this post), which was discovered along the river on the edge of Heathrow Airport by field mycologist Andy Overall. Other discoveries by scientists at Kew include:
- A Peruvian plant related to the sweet potato that could be a future food source.
- A rare and rare scaly shrub growing in the arid regions of Namibia, which has scaly leaves and grows in hot natural sand trays.
- A plant related to the pineapple, which is pollinated by hummingbirds, lives on a limestone cliff in central Brazil, but is at risk of extinction due to the mining of limestone to make cement.
- A bush related to the blueberry found near the world's largest gold mine in New Guinea, Indonesia.
- An herb with medicinal properties found in a forest on the border between Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
- Two new species of Aloe (as in Aloe vera) from Madagascar.
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The news
A poisonous mushroom collected at London Heathrow Airport is one of 156 new plants and fungi on the 2020 list
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.