Botanist Ynés Mexía started studying botany in her 50s, never finished college — and discovered two new genera and several new species of plants on a series of daring expeditions to remote areas of Central and South America.
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Mexía was 51 when she signed up for her first botany class. In the first few decades of her life, she'd been busy caring for her elderly father , outliving one husband and eventually divorcing a second, running a poultry business , and then starting a new career as a social worker. But in 1921, not long after joining the Sierra Club, she decided to pursue her interest in plants even further, and the 51-year-old Mexía became a student at the University of Berkeley.
She sold many of those 150,000 specimens to the California Academy of Sciences to fund her trip, and she funded most of her other expeditions the same way, selling specimens of interesting or unknown plants to collectors, museums, and university departments. She sent many of them by steamship, straight from the field. Today, those specimens still make up important research collections.
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