Typically, when you go out hunting for new species (as you do), at this point it's all about turning over rocks and zooming in on grains of sand in the Atacama desert or digging 300m into Russian permafrost.

But not always. Sometimes it's in a New York City trash can, or in our own bodies. Sometimes, the species is a 62 ton giant just standing there on display like... a tree.

Dinizia jueirana-facao

The dinizia... jue...iran... Ahem... The Dinjufa tree, as I'll call it from now on, was discovered in Espirito Santo, Brazil, in a small, narrow area of Atlantic forest. You'd think it would be hard to miss, being 40 metres tall and so heavy, but the fact is only 25 have ever been found. Given there are an estimated three trillion trees in the world, it kinda sounds more reasonable. It would be like finding a particular piece of dust in a field you lost a week ago.

How species are actually discovered

More significantly, the idea of modern day discoveries are often misunderstood. This tree was actually discovered over a decade ago, but it was mis-grouped, and this is where most taxonomy comes in. Though field discoveries do often happen, most of the time it's a case of re-organization, genetic analysis or looking realllll close at something.

For example, Dr Anne Bruneau did some DNA analysis of the tree to find out where it fits on the tree of life, so to speak, and found its closely related to Dinizia excelsa Ducke. This was interesting because it was believed that the genus Dinizia was what they call a monospecific genus - a group with only one species, the excelsa.

This bigger, 60m sister was discovered over 100 years or so ago, and is morphologically fairly similar to Dinjufa. But then the pollen expert Dr Hannah Banks compared the pollen between the two, and saw this:

The left is the Dinjufa pollen; smooth, singular grains. On the right, Dinexdu's pollen is grouped in aggregated tetrads - groups of four - and has a kind of rough, nobbly texture. The two trees clearly have different methods of dispersal.

These three classifications - morphological, genetic and seed-ey differences - confirms that the Dinizia genus is no longer monospecific, but duospecific, if that's a term. I don't see why it wouldn't be.

And this is how species are largely discovered. Not a single rock turned or grain of sand tweezered.

About the tree

It's pretty striking to me what details are studied in new species, thing that you would never be able to imagine. For example, this genus is what they call ectomycorrhizal, a symbiotic relationship between the roots of the tree and fungi. I talked about this ages ago so I'm not gonna go digging for the links but it's pretty interesting. Basically, this relationship:

...aids in water and nutrient uptake often helping the host plant to survive adverse conditions, and in exchange, the fungal symbiont is provided with access to carbohydrates. (wiki)

This actually occurs in about 2% of all plants, and there's a specific fungus species for each one. This could imply that if the 25 known Dinjufa trees go extinct, so does its little underground partner. But this is just my speculation.

The trees name is somewhat interesting. The 'facão' in Dinizia jueirana-facão is Portuguese for machete. When you look at the seed pods, half a metre in length, you can kinda see why it got its name. If like... you imagine just one of those pods, and it didn't look so flaccid. A machete, right??

Why bother with all this?

With news as of April this year that almost 10,000 tree species (that we know of) are about to go extinct, it's important that we catalogue whatever we can. Finding critically endangered species like this adds to the argument of environmental protection or funding to a reserve, for example, that this tree resides in.

If you want to read more about this discovery you can read more in the paper below. Thanks for reading!

_{Sources: Paper & Images: 'The majestic canopy-emergent genus Dinizia (Leguminosae: Caesalpinioideae), including a new species endemic to the Brazilian state of Espírito Santo' | 9,600 trees going extinct}