Pioneer woman botanist honored

SALT LAKE CITY, Jan. 3 (UPI) -- A U.S. biologist says he's named a new species of plant for a Frenchwoman who disguised herself as a man to join a 1766 global circumnavigation for science.

Although Jeanne Baret helped collect more than 6,000 specimens on the first French circumnavigation expedition, she was left without anything in the natural world to commemorate her name -- an oversight that University of Utah researcher Eric Tepe said he wanted to correct.

Tepe has named his newly discovered species -- a relative of the potato -- Solanum baretiae in a study published in the open-access journal PhytoKeys.

Baret was forbidden by royal ordinance from being on a French naval vessel as a woman, so she disguised herself as a man throughout the voyage to Rio de Janeiro, the Strait of Magellan, Tahiti, Mauritius, and Madagascar that collected specimens now in the French National Herbarium at the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris.