New plant species found in Kunming Jiaozi mountain

Researchers in Kunming, Yunnan Province have named a newly-found plant species as Wumeng aconite, according to Kunming Institute of Botany (KIB), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) on March 29.

This aconite was first noticed by the KIB scientists in 2009 in rock cracks that lie at an elevation of more than 4000 meters in the Jiaozi snow-capped mountain, some 180 kilometer north of Kunming. 

The species bears distinctive features though it looks similar to the aconitum geniculatum in same region, said Dr. Liu Ende with the Kunming institution. “And we haven’t found the novel species elsewhere.”

The researcher team from Germplasm Bank of Wild Species in Southwest China then named the plant after its discovery site, the Wumeng township in Luquan County, after the DNA study proved it to be a new species.

Chinese source: Yunnan Net; trans-editing by He Lin and Wang Shixue