Author: Miss Cellania / Source: Neatorama
In 1912, Norma Pfeiffer, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, discovered a new species of plant growing in the wetlands near Chicago’s Lake Calumet. It spent most of its life living off underground fungi. Nothing like it existed anywhere else in the United States, but there were similar species in the tropics.
Pfeiffer named it Thismia americana, and wrote her doctoral dissertation on it.Pfeiffer was excited to uncover much more about her mystifying botanical outlier. In her thesis, she expressed hope that she could grow the plant in laboratory settings.
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