Talk:Rafflesia

earlier comment
Isn't the "Corpse Flower" actually the titan arum? I'm just confused, because I know both smell highly of rotting meat, but I was pretty sure only the titan arum was considered "The Corpse Flower"... 24.67.253.203 11:54, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

Somebody who knows how should make this disambiguate to Amorphophallus_titanum as well, which is another flower that stinks like rotten meat and have the name Corpse Flower
 * You're correct, Amorphophallus titanum is widely known (especially in the popular press) as "corpse flower". MrDarwin 12:52, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

rafflesia, titan arum
I believe the titan arum is also called "dead horse arum"

Sorry, I was wrong about titan arum being called "dead horse arum". It is the Helicodiceros muscivorus that is called so. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.180.125.242 (talk • contribs)

What is the origin of the name? Is it named for the thief, or the hotel, or for someone else? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 64.26.98.90 (talk • contribs)


 * Quote from article: "and named after Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles." andy 23:59, 29 December 2006 (UTC)

big news, World's largest flower evolved from family of much tinier blooms
''The plant with the world's largest flower -- typically a full meter across, with a bud the size of a basketball -- evolved from a family of plants whose blossoms are nearly all tiny, botanists write this week in the journal Science. Their genetic analysis of rafflesia reveals that it is closely related to a family that includes poinsettias, the trees that produce natural rubber, castor oil plants, and the tropical root crop cassava.'' --Meika 20:43, 11 January 2007 (UTC)


 * As the link above doesn't work for me, here's the actual abstract of that article: http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/101/3/787?ijkey=b831816f017b346a02ca946d8bec3bff87ef686c&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha andy 20:52, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
 * First link doesn't work, second link is to a different paper published in 2004; try a Google News search to find recent news stories about it. MrDarwin 21:04, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I've fixed the first link. Mgiganteus1 21:24, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I also wondered about the year, reading this website now it seems like the new part is the result that the nearest family is Euphorbiaceae. I just reworded that part in the article already and added the citation of the earlier paper. Anyone having the full citation of this one? andy 21:35, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Done - however actually this maybe belongs into the article on the family Rafflesiaceae. andy 21:46, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
 * Let's wait until somebody can actually check the original paper (rather than secondary sources--anybody else notice that the CNN article had a photo of Amorphophallus titanum labeled as Rafflesia?) before making major changes to the article. While these stories are making a big deal out of Rafflesia having huge flowers and Euphorbiaceae having tiny ones, in fact several of the genera of Rafflesiaceae have much smaller flowers than Rafflesia itself, and some genera of Euphorbiaceae have relatively normal-sized flowers. MrDarwin 01:22, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
 * I checked the paper and added some material from it, including a version of the tree. A more detailed version is on the Rafflesiaceae page, but it's probably worth having something here as well.  KarlM 08:33, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

There is a little succulent which produces similar (though much smaller) flowers, rotten smell and all (though fishy rather than meaty). I've seen them growing in Spain. Can anyone identify it? Drutt 21:38, 19 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Found it, Stapelia lepida. Drutt 10:46, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

Precise evolutionary basis
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/315/5820/1812

REQUEST for flower size to practical object comparison please
it's be nice to see what these strange flowers look like when photographed with an object of absolutely discernable size seeing as i cannot read nor interpret metric worth two damns XD. Murakumo-Elite (talk) 08:29, 29 November 2007 (UTC)

The smallest flower
The article says "Even the smallest species, R. manillana, has 20 cm diameter flowers". Is this species really the smallest one?

From other sources on the net:

"Rafflesia manillana is an attractive species with a flower diameter of up to 24 cm."

"R. mira (29 cm in diameter), is much larger than R. speciosa (18-20 cm) of Antique Province, and definitely larger than Luzon’s R. manillana (14-20 cm in diameter)." "What could be the smallest Rafflesia in the Philippines (measuring 12-13 cm in diameter) was recently discovered in Mt. Asog in Camarines Sur,. The researchers from the Camarines Sur State Agricultural College who discovered it has proposed the species be named Rafflesia irigaenses."

"Rafflesia baletei is the smallest (9-22 cm in diameter) Rafflesia ever measured." 80.202.40.85 (talk) 05:37, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

New free use image
could be used in this article. -- Cirt (talk) 15:36, 28 April 2010 (UTC)

rafflesia in tiaong, quezon
i am not sure of what species i see in tiaong but it would be fascinating to find out. you can walk among lightly wooded areas of the town and see about five to ten flowers in an area of ten square meters. sad to say, people here feed the flowers to pigs. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 112.198.78.207 (talk) 19:30, 21 May 2010 (UTC)

Citation links to a protected article..
The citation #10 (^ "Rafflesia verrucosa (Rafflesiaceae), a new species of small-flowered Rafflesia from Mindanao, Philippines". Phytotaxa 10: 49-57. September 2010.) links to a PDF on a password-protected access only site. 203.82.95.107 (talk) 17:30, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

The common name "corpse flower" was invented by wikipedia, based on an incorrect website
Etymologically, the common name "corpse flower" is clearly an invention by Wikipedia, based on an old incorrect website. The first attestation of this name was in this legacy website, 2003 version. To quote: "Most flowers in the genus give off and smell of rotting flesh, hence its local name of corpse flower. This statement is incorrect, as far as I know. On 7 May 2003, this uncited text was copied to Wikipedia: "The flower smells like rotting meat, hence its local name translates to corpse flower". Soon afterwards, someone added the invented name "meat flower" to this sentence. Soon (see talk), someone correctly noted that the name "corpse flower" was actually generally used for Amorphophallus (including in Malay, btw), and added a paragraph of text disambiguating this (instead of deleting it). Over the following years the text ended up at the top of the article, and eventually the original sentence was removed, so that this remained in the lede of the article by 2010: "The name "corpse flower" applied to Rafflesia...". News organisations and popular websites started adopting the name from Wikipedia after this point. By now, dozen of articles appear a year using this name, all based on Wikipedia.

What to do about this? Confusion and inexpertise by Wikipedia editors must be cited is the source of the modern English common name. Name cannot just be deleted, people will re-add it. Cat is sort of out of the bag now... Hundreds of articles are using it now. Leo Breman (talk) 20:00, 28 October 2020 (UTC)
 * An interesting study on how a modern common name develops and the limitations of using the internet. Hardyplants (talk) 02:04, 5 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Indeed! Peter coxhead (talk) 10:15, 7 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Yeah, you can actually also look at the sources the 2003 student website used, using internet archive... One source of the source says the local Malay name is bunga padma, which is correct and can be traced to 1825 at least, likely earlier in classic Javanese tales. The local name for Amorphophallus titanum is bunga bangkai, i.e. 'carcass flower', the students seem to have mixed this up somehow. Leo Breman (talk) 15:23, 9 November 2020 (UTC)


 * I can see the how the mix up between two plants with famously large, stinky flowering structures could happen. There's similar confusion with Talk:Miracle fruit (plants famous for modifying the sense of taste), although that can be traced to pre-Wikipedia sources. Plantdrew (talk) 02:52, 10 November 2020 (UTC)

... I doubt that name came from Wikipedia and honestly I doubt it came from that website. Guinness currently refers to R. arnoldii as the "corpse flower", and to be honest, the reason I looked is I thought I remembered the name alongside a black-and-white printed picture of a Rafflesia flower in an edition from the 1980s... I no longer have the paper book, but before I claimed it was from a 2003 website I'd definitely want to find a copy of the Guinness book of world records which antedates that. | Largest single flower — Preceding unsigned comment added by 199.247.42.72 (talk) 18:06, 28 June 2023 (UTC)


 * The name "corpse flower" for Rafflesia is attested in a 1994 book published by Oxford University Press. I will remove the paragraph of commendable yet original research claiming misattribution. It is common in English for a common plant name to refer to multiple species, but I have also added that "corpse flower" more commonly means the titan arum, per Merriam-Webster. The name "stinking corpse lily" for Rafflesia is also attested in a 1991 book also published by Oxford University Press, and I have added it to the lede. Jade Ten (talk) 18:04, 17 March 2024 (UTC)

Quanta article about these flowers
Has some new info I guess. 2602:24A:DE47:BB20:50DE:F402:42A6:A17D (talk) 02:45, 22 April 2021 (UTC)