Make Room for a New Bloom: New Flower Discovered

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The world's newest flower is a species less than 140 years old hailing from southern Scotland, but its parents are from the Andes and North America's west coast. The yellow monkey flower, or Mimulus peregrinus—Latin for "wanderer," is described in the journal Phytokeys. (Click on the image for higher resolution.)

Mario Vallejo-Marin, a plant evolutionary biologist at the University of Stirling in Scotland, discovered M. peregrinus on a stream bank. Leaf and flower characteristics indicate its ancestors are M. guttatus and M. luteus, two species of monkey flowers transported from the Americas and cultivated by Victorian gardeners in the 1800s.

M. peregrinus's genus turns up around the world but most species grow in North America and Australia. Different monkey flower species can hybridize, although their offspring carry an odd number of chromosomes, rendering them sterile. "The classic example is if you cross a horse and a donkey, you get a sterile individual—a mule," Vallejo-Marin says. A rare mutation duplicated the entire genome of M. peregrinus. This polyploidic event evened out the number of chromosomes and the flower avoided a genetic dead-end.