A plant unseen for nearly 180 years has been found again — not in a laboratory, not in a herbarium archive, but alive in the forests of Jatinga Hills. Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma on Saturday, August 1, 2026, hailed the rediscovery of Rungia mastersii, a botanical species last recorded in the 19th century, calling it 'a remarkable milestone for our scientific community.'

A species lost to science for nearly two centuries

Rungia mastersii belongs to the family Acanthaceae, a group of flowering plants with numerous species across tropical Asia. Its disappearance from scientific records for roughly 180 years placed it among those species that researchers feared might be extinct or simply undocumented in an era before systematic field surveys. Its re-emergence from the Jatinga Hills in Dima Hasao district of Assam is the kind of find that rewrites a species' conservation status overnight. Jatinga Hills is already known to the scientific world — primarily for its extraordinary and still-debated phenomenon of migratory birds descending in large numbers during monsoon nights. That the same hills now yield a botanically significant rediscovery underlines how much of this terrain remains genuinely unexplored.

What Dima Hasao's forests hold

Assam accounts for a substantial share of India's northeastern forest cover, a biodiversity corridor that connects the Eastern Himalayas with the Indo-Burma hotspot — one of the world's most species-rich regions. Dima Hasao, a hill district with dense subtropical and temperate forest patches, has been the site of periodic botanical and zoological surveys, though systematic documentation has historically lagged behind the pace of ecological change in the region. Successive state governments have expanded protected areas and pushed biodiversity documentation alongside infrastructure development. The rediscovery of Rungia mastersii fits into a broader national effort to map endemic flora under India's biodiversity action plans — a programme that depends heavily on ground-level field surveys by botanists and forest department personnel.

Sarma's conservation signal

Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, who has regularly used conservation announcements to spotlight Assam's ecological credentials since taking office in 2021, framed the find as both a scientific achievement and a civic responsibility. 'Let us continue our collective efforts to preserve Assam's priceless natural heritage,' he wrote — a call directed as much at policymakers and the forest department as at the scientific community. The announcement is likely to focus attention on whether the site of the rediscovery in Jatinga Hills warrants formal protection — as a biodiversity heritage site or through an expansion of existing reserve boundaries. Botanical rediscoveries of this magnitude often trigger exactly such proposals, and the state's forest department will be watched for its next move. One plant, 180 years of silence, and a forest that clearly has more to say.