By Jordan Joseph
Botanists confirmed recently that a towering tree discovered in Tanzania’s Udzungwa Mountains is an entirely new species, Tessmannia princeps.
The research team is led by Andrea Bianchi, a horticulturist and researcher at Muse Science Museum in Trento, whose group worked with Tanzanian experts to document the species and its remote habitat.
Bianchi and local plant specialists were mapping plants in the Boma la Mzinga and Uluti Village Land Forest Reserves in 2019 when they nearly walked into a gray‑barked giant they could not name.
“This was already quite a shiver‑down‑your‑back moment because if they didn’t know [the species], it could have been something interesting,” Bianchi recalls.
Follow‑up surveys in the Udzungwa Mountain region revealed only about one hundred mature individuals scattered across two steep valleys, each tree crowned well above the surrounding canopy.
The specific name princeps, Latin for “most eminent,” nods to crowns that poke above neighboring foliage and to thick, consecutively buttressed trunks that command the landscape.
