Dr. Kathleen Pryer has named a family of ferns after Lady Gaga.
The scholar is a professor of biology at Duke University and is also the director of the campus’ herbarium.
Dr. Pryer has been conducting research on a specific family of plants for quite some time and has published her findings on these pteridophytes, which include two new varieties, in Systematic Botany.
The academic believes that this strain of vegetation encapsulates Gaga’s flamboyance.
"We study, in particular, a group of ferns called the cheilanthoid ferns, there are about 500 or 600 of them, and many of them tend to be more adapted to living in desert situations, which is unusual for ferns," Dr. Pryer told MTV News.
"We've been doing a lot of molecular sequencing, looking at a lot of plant material, doing a lot of field work, so we're now at the point where we're concluding some of the work, and we have enough evidence to be able to look at all the data and say, 'Hmmm, there's this group here that is really in the wrong genus. We need to give it a new name.'
"So often, people give names in honour of old white guys that have worked on ferns for a long time, but we didn't want to do that. And there were so many things about these 'Gaga ferns' that we decided to name the new genus after her, to celebrate diversity."
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