
Hiding in Plain Sight
Sometimes, new species are waiting to be discovered right under our noses—or arching over our heads.
By Andrew Murdock, Communications Director, Innovative Genomics Institute and Andrew Doran, Director of Collections
In 2021, Andy Murdock, a UC Berkeley botanist and the Communications Director at the Innovative Genomics Institute on campus, received an email from Leon Perrie from Te Papa Tongarewa (Museum of New Zealand). Perrie had recently returned from a collecting trip to New Caledonia, an island known for its diversity and many rare endemic plants. At a stop on Mt. Koghi, a well-collected site overlooking the capital of Noumea, he collected a large fern in the genus Ptisana that he didn’t recognize. Murdock, who had named and revised the genus in 2008, was a natural person to reach out to.
An Ancient Lineage and a Botanical Puzzle
Ptisana is a genus of ferns in the king fern family, the Marattiaceae, one of the oldest lineages of ferns, with fossils dating back over 300 million years. Many of the ferns in this family are notable for their immense size, often having leaves that are several meters long. Botanical gardens around the world, including the UC Botanical Garden, cultivate them in their tropical collections because of their dramatic appearance that looks like they just took a time machine from the Jurassic. New Caledonia was known to have two species of Ptisana found nowhere else in the world: a common medium-large species with darkly colored leaf stalks or “stipes,” and a rare dwarf species only known from a single population. What Perrie found was something else entirely—and much larger.

Andy Murdock (6 ft. 2 in.) leaning on a single Angiopteris leaf (much taller) in Cameron Highlands, Malaysia
A Surprising Find in Berkeley
Perrie asked Murdock if he had ever seen a fern like the large one he had collected in New Caledonia. By a strange coincidence, he had—in Berkeley almost daily. The UC Botanical Garden maintains two plant beds on the UC Berkeley campus in the atrium front of the University and Jepson Herbaria in the Valley Life Sciences Building, in the shadow of a towering Tyrannosaurus rex fossil. Planted to resemble a flora that the T. rex might have been familiar with was a Ptisana from New Caledonia collected in 1978 by the late botanist and Berkeley professor Rudi Schmid, and it matched Perrie’s collection exactly.

Leaves of Ptisana soluta (top middle) lean out into the atrium in front of the University and Jepson Herbaria, while a T. rex fossil looks on.
Murdock had often wondered about the plant. It had been identified as Ptisana attenuata, the common species from New Caledonia, but it looked different. It was larger. Instead of dividing three times, the leaves of this fern divided only twice except on some of the lowest leaflets. The stipes, instead of being dark blackish purple, were tan-green and mottled. But this fern was growing a long way from home in different conditions, and king ferns are known to be quite variable, so he had put it out of his mind until Perrie’s email arrived.

Closeup on fertile leaflets of Ptisana soluta. The name “soluta” means “breaking up,” in reference to the lower leaflets, which divide an additional time as seen here.

Fertile leaflets of Ptisana soluta. The light green capsules are spore-bearing structures called “synangia.” When these mature, they split open down the middle and release spores.
This exchange led to an international collaboration between Murdock, Leon Perrie and Lara Shepherd in New Zealand, and Rémy Amice, a local botanist in New Caledonia. The group sequenced portions of the genome from multiple collections across New Caledonia and surrounding areas, combed through collections in herbaria around the world looking for earlier collections, and dug into the literature.
A Species Rediscovered and Renamed
In 1922, the South African botanist Robert Compton had collected a plant in New Caledonia that he thought was a local form of the species found in Fiji. Others reported finding the species common in New Zealand. Murdock and colleagues found that the large New Caledonian Ptisana was related to both the Fijian and New Zealand species, but it was distinct in its own right. A species that had been hiding in plain sight, both in New Caledonia and on the UC Berkeley Campus, now has a new name: Ptisana soluta.
A Living Legacy at UC Berkeley
From a chance collection in 1978, the UC Botanical Garden has the only known plants of Ptisana soluta in cultivation. To visit, head to the Valley Life Sciences building on the Berkeley campus and head to the central atrium on the ground floor and look in the left-hand bed when facing the T. rex. The Botanical Garden maintains one of the most diverse fern collections in cultivation and is a nationally accredited collection by the American Public Gardens Association.

Ptisana soluta, propagated from leaf auricles at the UC botanical Garden means this rare plant in cultivation can be distributed to other botanical Gardens in addition to building the Garden’s national accredited collection of ferns.
To learn more about this collaboration read the full journal article.