Rhizanthes zippelii is a species of parasitic flowering plant without leaves, stems, roots, or photosynthetic tissue.

[6] B. bakhuizenii was the third species, named by Emil Johann Lambert Heinricher after his 1903/04 trip to the island for a taxon with a different flower colour on Java.

Backer and R. C. Bakhuizen van den Brink reduced B. bakhuizenii to a synonym of Rh.

lowii brown, but after reading Meijer's account of the change in flower colour, Bänziger followed Hooker in synonymising the taxa in 1995.

A number of characteristics were ambiguous, mixed or had ranges which overlapped with other groups, making them inadequate for differentiating taxa.

[4] Blume commemorated the horticulturist and plant collector Alexander Zippelius with the specific epithet (an eponym), who partially assumed his duties at the Bogor Botanical Gardens in Java when Blume departed for the Low Countries to write a proper flora of the region.

Zippelius was an important collector for Blume, he died from disease in Timor during a botanical expedition to the Moluccas, western New Guinea and other islands of the region.

He mentions that botanists were likely the main reason for the decline of the species, at least at Mount Salak, the most well-known collecting locality near Bogor.

Another reason for its continued absence was the further development of plantations in the area, but he suspected that the main reason why the plant had not been seen for such a long time was that the network of dedicated volunteers taking 'jungle hikes' in search of the flowers had disappeared when the Dutch colonial period ended, as had the Dutch-language journals which published information and coordinated people interested in such plants.

He mentioned that the old network was being replaced with high-school students taking such jungle excursions, but that their level of botanical knowledge was not yet adequate.

[4] Despite this, the Plants of the World Online database for some reason states that this species does not occur where it was collected from, Java, but that the distribution is Peninsular Malaysia and Myanmar, but not Thailand in between the two countries.

[3] These lobes are furthermore different by ending in a long hanging strips,[4][8] with its reddish-brown flesh colour and texture,[3][4] the flower thus looking like a big, fat, dead octopus on its head.

The flower is scentless when it first opens, but the odour soon grows fetid and rank, smelling of rotting carrion.

There is no clear difference between the two species, they are indistinguishable without dissecting the flowers and examining their insides microscopically.

[8] It appears to prefer to grow in the densest thickets in tropical rainforest on steep slopes, which is one reason it is little seen.