The botanical collections made by im Thurn and subsequent expeditions to Roraima’s summit became one of the important sources for the scientific description of tepui endemic plant species in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The plants of the tepui summits were not simply interesting.

They were, from a botanical perspective, deeply puzzling — families and genera that had no close relatives in the surrounding lowland forest, that seemed to belong to an entirely different ecological community, that showed adaptations to environmental conditions very different from tropical lowland conditions.

Among the collections from early Roraima expeditions were specimens of Heliamphora — the sun pitchers — which were new to science and had to be named and described.

The botanical names that resulted from these collections permanently attached Roraima’s name to several species: Heliamphora nutans is among the most widely known of the Roraima-associated Heliamphora species.