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A RARE variety of the world’s largest vegetable has been rediscovered in the
wild after 40 years. Scientists feared that the elephant’s foot—a variety
of wild yam—had become extinct in its only habitat, the Northern Cape
plateau of South Africa. Called elephant’s foot because of its huge edible tuber
that can weigh up to 300 kilograms, the yam was over-collected by botanists and
plant traders. But the sub-species of Dioscorea elephantipes was spotted by
botanists from the Millennium Seed Bank in Sussex during a seed-collecting
expedition to the plateau in February. Embarrassingly, says Paul Smith of the
seed…