The first time Davis saw a Rafflesia flower blooming in a Malaysian rainforest, he couldn’t believe it was real. It was a sweltering day in northern Borneo in 1995 and Davis, then an undergraduate, was collecting plants at the foot of Mount Kinabalu. He’d been studying plant diversity, and this flower, curiously emerging from a twisted thicket of vines, seemed to defy all rules. Davis was transfixed. “It was warty like a toad, smelled like a dead animal, felt wet like a sponge,” he recalls. “It was just so totally strange and otherworldly to me.”
Davis was hardly the first to succumb to the lure of the corpse flower (not to be confused with Amorphophallus titanum, which has a giant phallic protrusion and also happens to smell like rancid meat and bear the nickname corpse flower). In 1818, naval surgeon and naturalist Joseph Arnold, one of the first Europeans to collect a Rafflesia, called it “the greatest prodigy of the vegetable world.”
The mystery of this bizarre flower only deepened over the decades that followed, as a succession of biologists was drawn to it but unable to classify it, or the dozen or so other species of the family Rafflesiaceae they discovered in the forests of Southeast Asia, all lurid and stinking of decay.
Davis returned to his undergraduate studies, but he never forgot the flower he’d seen. A decade later, as a postdoctoral researcher, he was working on a multi-university collaboration called the Tree of Life, to piece together the phylogeny — that branching tree of evolutionary history — for all flowering plants.
The puzzle, known as “Darwin’s abominable mystery,” was to figure out how a quarter-million-plus species of flowering plants came, in a very short span of evolutionary time, to dominate the Earth.