''Acaena antarctica'' is a small herbaceous plant in the Rosaceae family native to

Argentina Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...

Chile Chile, officially the Republic of Chile, is a country in the western part of South America. It is the southernmost country in the world, and the closest to Antarctica, occupying a long and narrow strip of land between the Andes to the east a ...

and the

Falkland Islands The Falkland Islands (; es, Islas Malvinas, link=no ) is an archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean on the Patagonian Shelf. The principal islands are about east of South America's southern Patagonian coast and about from Cape Dubouze ...

Taxonomy and naming

''Acaena antarctica'' was first formally described in 1846 by

Joseph Dalton Hooker Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker (30 June 1817 – 10 December 1911) was a British botanist and explorer in the 19th century. He was a founder of geographical botany and Charles Darwin's closest friend. For twenty years he served as director of ...

. Kew holds specimens collected by Hooker from Hermite Island, Cape Horn on the Ross expedition.K000486068
an
K000486066
/ref> The

genus Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial nom ...

name ''Acaena'' is derived from the

Ancient Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic p ...

word ''akaina'' meaning "thorn" or "spine", referring to the spiny calyx of many species of ''Acaena''. The specific epithet, ''antarctica'', derives from the Greek (''anti'', "opposite" and ''arktos'', "bear") and designates the place opposite the constellations of the Great and the Little Bear, thus describing the species as coming from south of the South Pole circle.

References

External links

Photo of the plant
on

Flickr Flickr ( ; ) is an American image hosting and video hosting service, as well as an online community, founded in Canada and headquartered in the United States. It was created by Ludicorp in 2004 and was a popular way for amateur and profession ...

Herbarium specimen images & occurrence data
from GBIF {{Taxonbar, from=Q15288158

antarctica Antarctica () is Earth's southernmost and least-populated continent. Situated almost entirely south of the Antarctic Circle and surrounded by the Southern Ocean, it contains the geographic South Pole. Antarctica is the fifth-largest cont ...

Flora of Chile Flora of Argentina Taxa named by Joseph Dalton Hooker Plants described in 1846