Home / Nature

Biologists Overcome With Emotion After Finding Rare Flower Blooming in Indonesian Rainforest

By Sara Barnes on November 21, 2025

Man discovering Rafflesia hasseltii flower

It was a moment when a dream came true. After a long trek through a tiger-patrolled Sumatran rainforest (an island in Indonesia), Dr. Chris Thorogood and his team found Rafflesia hasseltii, a plant that’s been “seen by more tigers than people.” And even luckier for them, the rare plant, nicknamed the “Tiger-faced Mushroom,” was in the midst of blooming—something that takes up to nine months to develop and is only open for a few days.

In a clip posted by Thorogood, an associate professor of biology at Oxford University, the biologists were understandably emotional; they traveled day and night to find Rafflesia hasseltii. Team member and Indonesian flower hunter Septian “Deki” Andrikithat is seen in the video on his knees, sobbing with joy over this amazing discovery. At first, we don’t see the flower—just the reaction. Thorogood then cuts to the enormous blossom, which has large, speckled petals and a center that looks like the outside of a dragon fruit.

“This is very amazing,” Andrikithat shared, explaining that he had been looking for the elusive flower for 13 years. “I’m the luckiest guy alive,” Thorogood added. Amid the excitement, the team found time to sit and watch the flower quietly unfurl. It was an otherworldly experience, according to Thorogood, who could hardly believe their luck. “The odds of that are—well, I don’t even know what,” he told The New York Post, “It’s like it opened specially for us.”

Rafflesia is a genus of parasitic plants, meaning that it spends its life inside a host plant—in the Rafflesia hasseltii’s case, a tropical vine. It only appears above ground to bloom. Its flower emits a foul odor similar to rotten meat, classifying it colloquially as a “corpse flower.”

Watch the incredible discovery and emotion that followed, below.