Fear not, half a million flowering plant types haven’t suddenly gone extinct. The actual problem, a new study shows, is that of ‘synonymy’; an incredible amount of plant species carry multiple names. Botanists have long believed in a certain overestimate but, in fact, at least 600.000 known plant names appear to be duplicates, and therefore ought to be scrapped.
Part of the problem, at least historically, is that botanical literature is notoriously ambiguous. Overseeing all the species of plant that have already been identified and subsequently named by their discoverer, is an impossible task it seems. Because of that, it regularly happens that researchers who stumble upon an unfamiliar plant they believe to have discovered, label what is in reality an already-identified species.
Alan Paton, one of the involved researchers from the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew (London), sums up the dilemma: “there are generally about two and a half synonymous names for every accepted name”. As the number of plant species on earth is often estimated to be around one million, acute readers will notice that means a whopping 600.000 of those are potentially redundant duplicates. Such a number becomes less absurd, perhaps, when we realize that the all-familiar Solanum lycopersicum (the tomato, that is) carries about 800 alternative names already
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