They say beauty is on the inside, or that it’s only skin deep, and when it comes to this plant, that’s definitely the case.

Or at least, what’s cool goes far beyond the deceptively small exterior.

The Pacific Fern in question was found in Grande Terre, a volcanic archipelago in New Caledonia.

Botanist Jaume Pellicer, one of the researchers, said they very easily could have missed it.

“It doesn’t catch the eye. You would probably step on it and not even realize it.”

When they took T. oblanceolata back to the lab, though, they found the fern’s genome was packed with 160 billion base pairs of DNA.

To put it in perspective, that’s 50 times the size of the human genome, and easily the biggest genome known to science.

“This record-breaking genome challenges current understanding and opens new avenues to explore the evolutionary dynamics of genomic gigantism.”

T. oblanceolata holds about 11 billion more DNA pairs than the next-closest known plant genome, and 30 billion more than the largest animal genome.

For a visual representation, if one of the fern’s cells was rolled out it would be taller than the Statue of Liberty.

Scientists don’t know why the genome is so large, because there are numerous reasons it could be hard to manage.

They think it could have something to do with its environment as opposed to the needs to the plant itself.

Never judge a book by its cover.

Even if it’s a teeny-tiny fern.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about the mysterious “pyramids” discovered in Antarctica. What are they?