Scientists Named a New Desert Fig Species Hiding on Uluru

Some of the biggest discoveries in science happen in the most obvious places. On Uluru, the giant sandstone monolith in central Australia visited by hundreds of thousands of people every year, a fig tree has been growing, fruiting, and feeding wildlife for as long as anyone can remember — and it turns out scientists had been getting its name wrong the whole time. The desert fig species scientists now call Ficus desertorum was formally recognized as a species in its own right after researchers took a closer look at its leaves and realized this was no ordinary rock fig.

Before the renaming, these trees were lumped in with Ficus brachypoda, a fig species found widely across northern and central Australia. But the leaves of the desert fig species are smoother, narrower, and thicker than their northern cousins, with stiff, dark-green, lance-shaped blades that botanists now treat as the tree's signature. As reported by ScienceAlert, the tree had been "hiding in plain sight for years" — mistaken for a familiar neighbor when it was a stranger all along.

How the desert fig species was unmasked

The story of the desert fig species begins not in a remote jungle but in the drawers of museums. Brendan Wilde, an honours student who had been studying Australian native figs for a decade, first noticed that the figs of central Australia did not quite match the Ficus brachypoda label. He brought the puzzle to systematic botanist Russell Barrett of the National Herbarium of New South Wales, an expert on the plants of northern Australia.

What followed was a slow, painstaking audit. Barrett and Wilde compared collections held in herbaria across Australia against historical specimens stored in European herbaria, checking leaf shape, venation, and surface texture population by population. The pattern held: the central Australian trees were morphologically distinct from the more northern and western populations, with their own regional habitat. The type specimen — the single pressed plant that formally anchors the name — was collected on Uluru's Mutitjulu walk on 19 May 1988, and sat in a collection for decades before anyone grasped its significance.

The formal description appeared in the journal Telopea, the open-access publication of the National Herbarium of New South Wales, in November 2021. In the paper, titled "Hiding in plain sight," the authors lay out the diagnostic details: petioles 9 to 34 millimetres long, stiff lanceolate leaves 46 to 120 millimetres long, many fine parallel veins, and lower leaf surfaces with only slightly sunken veins — unlike the strongly sunken, finely netted undersides of true Ficus brachypoda. According to the Australian Institute of Botanical Science, whose reporting on the find was carried by phys.org, the study of herbarium collections showed the central Australian populations were "indeed morphologically distinct" from their northern relatives.

Barrett called the find a career highlight, saying that recognizing a new species is always exciting but finding one on Uluru is "not something you expect in a lifetime of research." It is easy to see why: Uluru is one of the most studied, most photographed landscapes in Australia, and the figs are among the few trees tough enough to grow on its forbidding sandstone face.

A tree sacred to many nations

For the people who know this desert fig species best, it was never just another tree. These figs are deeply significant to First Nations peoples of central Australia — a source of food, a source of shelter, and a spiritual presence in an unforgiving landscape. Damaging the trees could historically be punishable by death, such was their importance to the whole community.

That cultural weight shaped the naming itself. Discussions with the Australian Central Land Council explored whether an Indigenous name might be more appropriate than a Latin one. But the tree carries different names in different languages — tywerrk in Alyawarr and Anmatyerr, tjurrka in Arrente, ili in Pintupi and in Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara, wÿirrki in Warlpiri — and no single Indigenous name spans all the language groups. As Barrett explained, choosing any one existing name could effectively exclude the others from the same degree of significance.

So the researchers chose a standard scientific name for the desert fig species instead: Ficus desertorum, a nod to the desert the tree calls home. It is a rare thing — a fig thriving in the middle of an arid continent. The tree's fruit is known as mai pulka in Yankunytjatjara, and the figs have fed people in some of Australia's driest country for tens of thousands of years.

Why the desert fig species matters

Naming a species does more than fill in a label. Once the desert fig species has a scientific identity, it can be tracked, monitored, and protected as its own entity rather than disappearing inside the records of a different tree. That matters because the desert fig lives on the edge: it is quite widespread but only in small populations, growing on rocky outcrops, mesas, and around waterholes across central Australia — not just Uluru but also Kata Tjuta (the Olgas) and Karlu Karlu (the Devils Marbles).

According to the researchers, the desert fig species is not currently threatened. But its small, scattered populations leave it exposed: shifts in climate or localized damage such as hot fires could hit it hard in the near future. The tree's survival trick is legendary even by fig standards. Figs are famous for roots that hunt water, and the desert fig has perfected the art — roots have been reported following cracks in cliff walls for more than 40 metres to reach water hidden deep in the rock or in a secluded pool far below.

The tree is also an apartment block for desert wildlife. Its leaves provide shelter for the western bowerbird and a wide variety of native snails that gain precious shade in an otherwise arid environment, as noted in Scimex's coverage of the discovery. Put in global context, the find belongs to a remarkable family: some 750 fig species exist worldwide, about two-thirds of them in Asia and Australasia, with Australia contributing 43 native species. The desert fig is one of the toughest of them all.

For readers, the takeaway is delightfully direct. The next time you see a photo of Uluru — or stand at its base among the crowds — look for the dark-green crowns wedged into the rock. Spotting the desert fig species means looking at a tree that fed people for millennia before science learned its name, a tree whose roots may be threading 40 metres through the stone beneath your feet. It is a reminder that discovery is not finished: even on the most visited rock in the outback, nature was keeping a secret. The desert fig species proves that sometimes the most exciting finds are the ones we have been walking past all along. For more on the surprising lives of figs, see GenZ NewZ's Plants and Trees coverage, including how strangler figs are rebuilding burned forests from scratch — proof that this family of trees keeps rewriting the rules.