Chinese scientists have rediscovered a critically endangered plant in China, known as “Euonimus aquifolium”, more than 110 years after it was first discovered in the country.

A team of Chinese scientists, headed by Hu Jun, discovered the plant in a valley during the country’s second scientific expedition to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in 2021, according to what was published by the Chinese “Xinhua” agency.

In 1908, British botanist Ernest Henry Wilson first collected three samples of the rare plant in southwestern China’s Sichuan Province, but since then, no one has seen it again until August 2021, when Hu Jun and his team found about 15 plants suspected of being “” Euonymus aquifolium” on the escarpment of a ravine near Mount Gongga.

“I was very lucky. Some experts have been searching for it for more than a decade but to no avail,” said Hu Jun, an assistant researcher at the Chengdu Institute of Biology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.