The orchid hid in plain sight for years — then got its own name

For years, botanists walked past it, and one old illustration even filed it under the wrong name. The little orchid clinging to the trees of Babeldaob Island in Palau was quietly being its own species all along. It took Benjamin Crain — a biology professor at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls and a conservation biologist — eight years of fieldwork, dusty herbarium records and detective work to prove it. First spotted in 2018 while he was surveying for the Smithsonian's orchid conservation program, the flower is now formally described in the Harvard Papers in Botany as Agrostophyllum lkou, found nowhere else on Earth. A whole species, hiding in a forest people thought they knew.