Tiny fern with big secret gets into the Guinness Book of World Records

Tmesipteris oblanceolata is an obscure species of fork fern found in New Caledonia, a French territory in the South Pacific. Just 4 to 6 inches tall, the humble plant is, in one particular way, the most remarkable living thing in the world.“You would walk over it. You might even tread on it without knowing it,” said Ilia Leitch, a plant evolutionary biologist and senior research leader at the U.K.’s Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. “But it houses within it this great secret.”Recently, T. oblanceolata entered the Guinness Book of World Records after a team of scientists determined…