Deep in a national park in western Thailand, botanists came across a flower that looks like a small demon staring up from the forest floor. The bloom is nearly black, crowned with horn-like appendages, and ringed at its base with patches of vivid reddish-orange that resemble glowing eyes. The team that found it decided the name had to match the look: Thismia daemona, the devil flower.

The species was formally described this month in the open-access journal PhytoKeys by botanists from Chulalongkorn University and Prince of Songkla University, who collected it during plant surveys of Thong Pha Phum National Park. According to the study, it is the 16th species of Thismia recorded in Thailand.

A plant that skips photosynthesis

Thismia is a genus of small flowering plants sometimes called fairy lanterns, but the devil flower shares none of a lantern's charm. Like its relatives, it contains no chlorophyll and cannot photosynthesize. It spends almost its entire life hidden beneath dead leaves, drawing nutrients from underground fungi through a feeding strategy botanists call mycoheterotrophy. Without leaves, without green pigment, and with almost no need for sunlight, the plant can live in places where an ordinary flower would starve.

The horns and eyes that give the flower its startling appearance are actually tepals, the fleshy outer parts of the bloom. The horn-like appendages crown a dome-shaped structure called a miter, while the reddish-orange patches sit low around the base. The whole flower is tiny, and its habit of staying buried in leaf litter explains why survey teams can walk through a whole population without spotting a single bloom. The same details, the horn-like tepals on top and the glaring patches below, feature in Nautilus's write-up of the discovery.

The place where it grows surprised the researchers almost as much as the flower itself. Most Thismia species are known from perennially humid lowland rainforests, but this population was growing at nearly 1,000 meters, about 3,300 feet above sea level, in a seasonal montane evergreen forest. That is an unusually high and seasonally dry setting for the genus, which made the find stand out even before anyone looked closely at the flower.

A range pushed north for the first time

The devil flower belongs to Thismia section Geomitra, a subgroup previously known only from Peninsular Malaysia, Borneo, and Sumatra. Its discovery in western Thailand pushes the known range of the entire section northward for the first time, according to the researchers. "Finding Thismia daemona in Thong Pha Phum National Park was indeed a major surprise," said Dr. Sahut Chantanaorrapint of Prince of Songkla University in a statement. "Typically, Thismia species are known to occur in perennially humid lowland rainforests; however, this population was discovered in a seasonal, montane evergreen forest at an elevation of nearly 1,000 meters above sea level."

That kind of range extension is exactly what makes small, overlooked groups of plants worth surveying. A single mountain park turned out to hold a species that rewrites where an entire section of the genus is thought to live.

Rare from the day it was named

But the devil flower reached science's attention already in trouble. Researchers know of just one population of fewer than 50 individuals, all growing in an area smaller than a football field, around 0.02 square miles. It has been provisionally assessed as Critically Endangered, and the assessment points to a practical problem: its only known habitat sits inside a national park popular with tourists, where foot traffic can disturb the delicate leaf litter the plant depends on.

Chantanaorrapint says the response should follow the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere concept, which pairs biodiversity protection with human engagement. "A key next step is adopting a sustainable conservation approach aligned with the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere concept, harmonizing biodiversity conservation with human engagement," he said in a statement. "Inspiring local people to take pride in their natural heritage not only safeguards the microhabitat, but also supports sustainable, community-led ecotourism."

For now, the devil flower stays where it has always been: half-buried in the leaf litter of a Thai mountain forest, skipping sunlight and borrowing its meals from fungi, with a bloom that looks like a tiny demon. It stayed hidden long enough that botanists only just found it. The conservation plan now taking shape is meant to make sure it stays that way, protected in place rather than loved to death by the visitors who come to see it.