In the summer of 2008, Jan Kirschner led an expedition to the highlands of southeastern Kazakhstan in search of a dandelion. Not just any dandelion: He was hunting kok-saghyz, a flower much like the common roadside weed that flourishes all over the world. But kok-saghyz (pronounced “coke-suh-GEEZ”) grows only in remote valleys of the Tien Shan Mountains.
Kirschner, a Czech taxonomist, was not the only dandelion hunter to visit Central Asia around that time. An expedition from the U.S. Department of Agriculture scoured the same valleys just a few weeks behind him. Two years earlier, an Israeli-Kazakh team had visited the area and concluded that kok-saghyz was worryingly rare.