 Iltis used an illustration of this plant for a New Year's greeting card that he sent to family and friends in 1976.This drawing prompted a Mexican colleague, Luz María Villarreal de Puga (1913–2013), to launch an intensive search for just such a plant, and one of her students, Rafael Guzmán, found it (or so he thought) growing in the wild.In 1978, Iltis led a team of botanists to the site and determined that it was in fact a heretofore unknown species of teosinte, "Zea diploperennis", which is valued for its resistance to certain viruses.