Rare, new species of giant tree in the Amazon named after Professor Oliver Phillips

Professor Phillips writes about the discovery of the 35-meter-tall giant ‘hiding in plain sight’ in the intact Amazon rainforest of southeastern Peru.

Amazonia has at least 7,000 different tree species compared to just a few dozen in the United Kingdom. 

However, the discovery of a new tree species only occurs occasionally, and collections of flowers or fruits are required to confirm their novelty.  

Even just seeing their flowers and fruits is challenging, since most species are extremely rare and infrequently reproduce.  

When they do, the flowers and fruits are usually out of sight, high in the canopy. Simply getting to the canopy requires climbing, dexterity, and strength.

 

Re-discovered after four decades of searching 

Forty years ago, the legendary South American botanist Alwyn Gentry, who later advised my PhD at the Missouri Botanical Garden, suspected that an unidentified tree he collected from a plot in Tambopata was different from anything known to science. 

With a sample of only a few leaves, it was impossible to be sure. Botanists have been searching for it ever since. 

Finally, in 2023, prominent Peruvian botanists Rodolfo Vásquez, Rocío Rojas, and Abel Monteagudo discovered a large and unusual fruiting tree in Tambopata, whose fruits were being eaten by macaws and howler monkeys.  

With the curiosity typical of botanists, Rocío Rojas tasted the remains of the fallen fruit and noticed that it had a spicy flavour, a feature typical of the genus Drypetes.  

Once collected by the team, its leaves perfectly matched Gentry's original collection. 

They named it Drypetes oliveri.  

For me, this was a touching honour, not only because my friends and colleagues made the discovery, but also because they published it in a new Peruvian journal named after Gentry and created by the new Amazonian University just downriver from Tambopata.

Professor Oliver Phillips and Rodolfo Vásquez working in the Peruvian jungle in 1998

Rodolfo Vásquez working in the shadow of one of the newly discovered trees

Alwyn Gentry’s legacy 

Gentry was killed tragically in 1993 in a small plane crash in Ecuador, pursuing his twin passions of discovery and conservation.  

His legacy lives on in many ways, including through his plots in Peru.  

My life as a tropical ecologist, and what was to become RAINFOR, the world-wide network of Amazon forest scientists and plots, and its global sibling ForestPlots.net, began with a few botanical plots that Gentry established at Tambopata. 

Today they are amongst the longest running monitoring sites on the planet and are showing us the many ways in which forests everywhere are changing in response to climate change. 

This includes having slowed it for at least forty years, having taken up billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide since the 1980’s. 

A fragile future 

For the new tree species, the future is uncertain. Known only from this one site in Peru, it is scarce even there—so far four individuals are known to science!  

It is thus extraordinarily vulnerable and immediately classified as an Endangered Species on the Global Conservation Red List.  

Near Tambopata, gold mining is devouring forests, ruining communities and polluting rivers. 

Further afield, road development increasingly connects the Brazilian Amazon to the Peruvian coast and global markets beyond, driving further deforestation. 

And with ever-increasing temperatures and the proliferation of fires, a dense cloud of smoke now hangs over the entire southern Amazon every dry season. 

The very survival of this species, like that of thousands of others, depends on a lot of things going right over the next forty years. 

But it is thanks to dedicated colleagues like Al Gentry, Rodolfo Vásquez, and other scientific explorers like them that we have some idea of what treasures we have in the first place.