Scientists search for a female partner for world’s ‘loneliest’ plant

“Surely this is the most solitary organism in the world,” wrote palaeontologist Richard Fortey in his book about the evolution of life. The only known wild E. Woodii was discovered in 1895 by the botanist John Medley Wood while he was on a botanical expedition in the Ngoye Forest in South Africa. The evolutionary journey of cycads Cycads are the oldest surviving plant groups alive today and are often referred to as “living fossils” or “dinosaur plants” due to their evolutionary history dating back to the Carboniferous period, approximately 300 million years ago. As E. woodii is considered extinct in the wild, synthetic images were used in the AI model’s training to improve its ability, via an image recognition algorithm, to recognise cycads by shape in different ecological contexts. Finding a female would mean E. woodii is no longer at the brink of extinction and could revive the species.