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I was very excited to see this plant on the New Dixie Mine Road at Ruby Mountain back in 2011! While wandering around in the first hour, I came across this specimen, which immediately looked different to me from the Monoptilon bellioides in the Borrego Desert.

Thanks to RT Hawke, who had the Jepson Desert Manual, we were able to immediately key this to M. bellidiforme.

We looked for the "1 plume-tipped bristle" in the pappus in the field, which was very hard to see. But I finally found it with a hand lens.

Even after seeing it by eye in the field with my hand lens, I had to hunt in my photographs to find it. I've marked the bristles in three pix, which are accompanied by the unlabeled pix, presented first, if you want to try to find it first on your own. (:-) Try it on pix #9, #11, and #13, before looking at the labeled pix #10, #12, and #14.

A much easier way to distinguish these species is the ray length, at least when the ray length is not 5.0 mm. The ray length for M. bellidiforme is 3-5 mm (the entire corolla is 5-7 mm, including the claw); and 5-8.5 mm (6-11.5 mm) for M. bellioides.

The pix with a ruler here shows the ray length for this plant is 3.8-4.0 mm, well within the range for M. bellidiforme.

From the one or two plants here, it is tempting to conclude that M. bellidiforme makes up for its smaller flowers by having tons more of them. But in the Cactus Flat Road area, we found plants with just a few flowers each.

The last pix here was taken two hours later, at 5:42 p.m. Monoptilon flowers close in the late afternoon.

I thank Tommy Stoughton for alerting me to the wonderful bloom in this area.

Apparently it's been 7 years since I first stumbled on this weird little disjunct population, so I was thrilled to see it was still kicking this weekend. If you visit it, please don't pick a thallus like I did 7 years ago to check the lower surface. I've only been able to find a few nearby patches of it so I imagine the population is quite small and it probably needs every square milimeter of thallus. Frankly, they're probably much more threatened by a poorly-operated grader or a pack of rototilling pigs, but still, worth being careful.

Bibliografía y recomendaciones para tus registros. Las fotografías y descripciones que hagas, te van a permitir identificar el ejemplar.

Infografías Hongos de Colombia:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tn-JDRz-_PIBXYJmyoyvY_IbIkbipGPf?usp=sharing

Más información en:
https://colombia.inaturalist.org/journal/teodoro_chivatabedoya/54937-registro-de-hongos-macromicetos

Bibliografía General de Macromicetos:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19VZivWVc5ueyBABX73KIfBGei9smvMzh?usp=sharing

Otras recomendaciones en:
Grupo XYLARIA Hongos de Colombia ©2016
FACEBOOK: www.facebook.com/groups/xylariahongosBogota/
INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/hongos_colombia/

Found while hiking the trail to Chaparral Mountain, which can be rather hard to find in many parts of the second half. I blogged my hike here.