For a plant that looks like a prickly weed, it’s getting a lot of love.
A new species of plant has been found in the remote West Texas town of Valentine. The extremely rare desert-dweller is a distant, much spinier relative of the eggplant — although it’s most likely not edible for either humans or animals.
The scrappy little growth, which is possibly poisonous and may be near extinction, was named Solanum cordicitum. That’s a Latin variation of “from the heart” — a tip of the hat to the town of 134 residents where it was discovered.
A study identifying it as a new species was published in the Aug. 1 issue off the Journal of the Botanical Research Institute of Texas. The issue was released Wednesday. Two previous examples of the plant were discovered in 1974 and 1990, but those plants were repeatedly misidentified over the years as members of several different species
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