Newspaper article from our research archive:

World's largest flower had a tiny start.

Byline: Eric Hand

ST. LOUIS _ The world's largest flower, a voluptuous beauty as red as lipstick and as big as a child, makes its physical home in the steamy jungle floors of southeast Asia.

Now, analysis of the flower's DNA has placed it in a strange taxonomical home _ in a family of plants with tiny flowers.

Rafflesia, as it's called (Rah-flee-zee-ah), is freak of nature. But it seems the flower is also a freak of evolution. How did such big flowers, some a yard wide, evolve from flowers less than an inch across?

"It's a mind blower," said Daniel Nickrent, a Southern Illinois University at Carbondale plant biologist and one of the authors of the study, ...

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