New species- Rhynchotechum nirijuliense
J.M. Garg
Dear members,
Posted on Facebook, by one of our members as below:
The 2nd species that got published today is Rhynchotechum nirijuliense from Nirijuli Hills of Arunachal Pradesh.
Story: It was the year 2016. I and Miss Momang were student of Master’s and were very curious about each plant we see, though rarely knew the name of any. We regularly took trips to the nearest jungle of Nirijuli. Among the many plants, a shrub with pink flowers borne in the axils of leaves repeatedly took our notice for a year, but we never hardly tried to identif...y. God knows, what we were exactly in search of!
Later the next year we came to know, that the plants were a species of Rhynchotechum and collected all the different ones present there, and extended our search to find the other ones distributed in our region. On a detailed study we could so far collect R. ellipticum, R. vestitum, R. alternifolium R. parviflorum and the interesting one from Nirjuli which doesn’t fits to any known species so far. On communication with Benjamin Anderson and David Middleton who revised the genus, it was confirmed to be new. And got lucky to describe it with the gigantic help from Benjamin who repeatedly revised my manuscript before publication for almost 15 times.
Rhynchotechum is a very complex genus and needs careful eyes for species delimitation, as all the species look superficially similar. But the fruits preserves some good identification details.
R. nirijuliense is named after the Nirijuli Hills, the pockets of which still preserves some beautiful plants, but the new settlements have threatened the survival of many. You can see this species there and adjoining areas of Papum Pare district. We hope you enjoyed the reading.
Link to the full article: https://www.researchgate.net/…/342353115_Rhynchotechum_niri…
With love
Dipoo Dipankar Borah
J.M. Garg
J.M.Garg
'Creating awareness of Indian Flora & Fauna'
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