First plant species discovered on Facebook

The first new species of plant to be discovered on Facebook is the aptly named magnificent sundew Drosera magnifica, one of nearly 200 species of carnivorous plant belonging to the sundews' taxonomic family, Droseraceae. Up to 1.5 m long, it was identified by experts as a hitherto-unknown species in July 2015 after amateur researcher Reginaldo Vasconcelos posted a photo of a sundew plant that he had encountered back in 2012 while exploring a jungle on a mountain top in Minas Gerais, southeastern Brazil.

Its status as the first new species of plant to be discovered on Facebook was confirmed by botanist Dr Andreas Fleischmann from the Botanical State Collection of Munich, Germany, who was a co-author of the 2015 paper in which this species was formally described and named. The largest species of New World sundew, it is also the second-largest species of any type of carnivorous plant currently known from the New World, so its belated discovery by science provides further proof of the diversity of wildlife forms that may still await discovery in tropical rainforests around the world – especially as in this particular case it is a large, showy species that exists on a readily accessible mountain peak, rather than being a small, inconspicuous species existing in some very inaccessible, remote locality.