[5] The first British person to see one was Joseph Arnold in 1818, in the Indonesia rainforest in Bengkulu, Sumatra, after a Malay servant working for him discovered a flower and pointed it out to him.

[6] The flower, and the genus, was later named after Stamford Raffles,[7] the leader of the expedition and the founder of the British colony of Singapore.

The following is from Arnold's account of discovering the flower:[6] Here I rejoice to tell you I happened to meet with what I consider as the greatest prodigy of the vegetable world.

[citation needed] A team of morphologists and geneticists headed by Prof. Charles Davis of Harvard has discovered an important difference between Rafflesia spp.

The foul odour attracts insects such as carrion flies, which transport pollen from male to female flowers.

[citation needed] Rafflesia are also remarkable for showing a large horizontal transfer of genes from their host plants.

[15] In Malay, the 'normal' R. hasseltii is vernacularly known as pakma, patma or ambai-ambai,[6][15][16] whereas the goliath R. arnoldii from Sumatra is called krubut or kerubut, 'great flower'.

[3] It is also known as "corpse flower", or bunga bangkai in Indonesian,[17] a name that more commonly refers to the titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum) of the family Araceae.

[1] In 1999 the British botanical historian David Mabberley pointed out that the genus Rafflesia was first validated by an anonymous report on the meeting published in the Annals of Philosophy in September 1820 (the name was technically an unpublished nomen nudum until this publication).

[20] However, as that is nowhere stated in the Annals, per Article 46.8 of the code of ICBN, Mabberley was wrong to formally ascribe the validation to Gray.

[22] Another 2004 study confirmed this result using both mtDNA and nuclear DNA sequences, and showed the three other groups traditionally classified in Rafflesiaceae were unrelated.

[26] As of October 2020[update], Plants of the World Online accepted the following species:[27] Research published in 2014 revealed that one Philippine Rafflesia species from the island of Luzon, R. lagascae (a synonym of R. manillana), may have lost the genome of its chloroplast and it is speculated that the loss happened due to the parasitic lifestyle of the plant.

[34] Furthermore, two locations in Pahang where this flower can be found are Lembah Benum forest reserve and Lata Jarum.

[37] The locations of these flowers are turned into tourist attractions for biodiversity lovers and hikers and helps to generate income for the local people.

[33] Species native to Borneo include Rafflesia arnoldii, R. cantleyi, R. hasseltii, R. keithii, R. kerrii, R. pricei, R. tengku-adlinii and R. tuan-mudae.

Due to its size, the flower is generally found on the forest floor growing on the underground stem or root of Tetrastigma lanceolarium.

The medium-sized R. mira flowers measure about half a meter in diameter and they have round or elliptic perigone wart.

[43] A fourth species is Rafflesia verrucosa which is found only in Mount Kampalili in Davao Oriental Province.

[48][49] In Rafflesia arnoldii the flowers are visited by the flies Drosophila colorata, Chrysomya megacephala and Sarcophaga haemorrhoidalis.

They are also harvested for herbalism, a concoction is believed to act as a sexual stimulant and to help for fever or backache.

[49] On Java the buds of R. zollingeriana are harvested and dried for use in jamu, the ancient traditional herbalism of the island.

[52] Research in Malaysia and Indonesia has made it possible to propagate the species for use in horticulture, with the famous Bogor Botanical Garden growing the first plants in the 1850s using grafts of infected vines.