Sanicula fengjiensis: New Species Hiding in China's Forests

A slender herb growing along roadsides and stony slopes in Fengjie County, in China's Chongqing Municipality, has turned out to be a species new to science. The plant, formally named Sanicula fengjiensis by a team of Chinese botanists, belongs to the carrot family and had been mistaken for years for a widespread lookalike. The description, reported in the journal Ecology and Evolution, rests on a combination of fine-scale fruit anatomy and genome sequencing that finally separated the Fengjie plants from their close relatives. You can read the original paper here and a summary of the discovery at ScienMag.

The genus Sanicula, known as sanicles or snakeroots, holds roughly forty-two taxa spread from East Asia to North America. Taxonomists regard it as one of the most confusing lineages in its subfamily, since its members vary wildly in roots, leaves, flower heads and especially fruits. China is one of the group's centers of diversity, home to about sixteen species, and only a handful of new Sanicula species have been accepted worldwide in the last two decades.

The fruits gave it away

The trail started during botanical surveys conducted from 2022 through 2024, when the researchers noticed an unusual Sanicula population whose dense flowering heads matched those of Sanicula caerulescens, a species found across China and into Vietnam. The difference showed up in the fruit, which is the single most important diagnostic feature in this genus. In S. caerulescens the tiny fruits are studded with short straight prickles joined at the base into a thin sheath. The Fengjie fruits had no prickles at all; their ribs were fused at the base and the grooves between them carried only a few sparse scales or bumps.

To test whether they were looking at a genuine new taxon, the team examined material from sixty-four herbaria and studied living plants from a dozen wild populations, watching the type population through two full growing seasons. Some individuals were brought into cultivation at the Institute of Botany of Jiangsu Province and the Chinese Academy of Sciences for repeated observation. Ten measured characters went into a principal component analysis, and according to the researchers, the first two components accounted for roughly half of all variation, with the Fengjie plants landing clearly apart from their three closest relatives. The sharpest separator was the height of the tiny appendages on the fruit surface: in Sanicula fengjiensis they ran from barely three hundredths to a tenth of a millimeter, with no overlap at all with the taller bristles of its cousins. Flower color added a visible cue, white in the newcomer against the blue-to-purple petals of S. caerulescens.

DNA confirmed the split

Morphology alone rarely settles cases this tangled, so the team sequenced the plants as well. They assembled the complete chloroplast genome for four individuals, each one a closed circle of DNA carrying one hundred thirty-two genes, and added dozens of new sequences from two regions of nuclear DNA used as standard plant barcodes. Three separate tree-building methods all recovered the four Fengjie accessions as a single coherent clade with full statistical support. The nuclear and chloroplast trees disagreed slightly about the exact placement of Sanicula fengjiensis among its cousins, a common pattern the authors put down to ancient hybridization or incomplete lineage sorting, but both datasets agreed on the core result: the Fengjie plants form their own evolutionary lineage.

The detective work reached back into the herbarium too. Among the historical collections the team found a specimen gathered in 1963 near Huanglingmiao in Yichang, Hubei Province, whose fruit characters matched the Fengjie plants exactly. Three targeted searches of that area in 2021, 2023 and 2024 failed to find any living plants, so the team treats the old specimen as a historical record rather than proof of a second population. As things stand, Sanicula fengjiensis is known with certainty only from its type locality at Lianhua Village in Fengjie County, growing along roadsides, in forest understory and on stony slopes at unusually low elevations, about a hundred to two hundred meters, well below the range of its relatives. Flowering runs from late March into early May, with fruiting extending into June. With only one confirmed population, the authors tentatively list the species as Data Deficient under the IUCN Red List criteria, noting that it appears rare even where it grows.

Beyond the new name, the paper offers a wider lesson about how much taxonomy still hides in plain sight. In groups where herbarium specimens often lack the reproductive structures needed for identification, fruit anatomy paired with genomics can pull a cryptic lineage out from under a widespread lookalike. For a plant known from a single village hillside and one sixty-year-old pressed specimen, that formal name is what will let the next survey know what it is looking for.