Rafflesia
| Rafflesia | ||||||||||||||
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| Rafflesia arnoldi |
Rafflesia arnoldi is the world's largest single flower. It was discovered in the Indonesian rain forest by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles and Dr. Joseph Arnold in 1818. It has no leaves and hardly any stem, just a huge speckled 5-petaled flower over a meter across and weighting up to 10 kilogram. The flower smells like rotting meat, hence its local name translates to corpse flower. It is parasitic on a vine, spreading its roots inside the vine. The fruit is eaten by tree shrews. The genus Rafflesia contains 16 species, all found on the Malay Peninsula, Borneo and Sumatra.
The world's largest flower is Titan Arum (Amorphophallus titanum); its individual flowers are arranged in a spadix.