In 1763 Governor Arthur Dobbs of North Carolina, was the first person to describe the plant which he named ‘Fly Trap Sensitive’ which was later renamed as the Venus Flytrap.
A few years later in 1770, specimens were sent to England, where it was the first plant ever recorded as being carnivorous.
In 1770, in London, merchant and botanist John Ellis published the first description of ‘a new sensitive plant, called Dionaea muscipula: or, Venus’s fly-trap.’ Beauty and the beast: Dionaea, referring to the mythical goddess of love and beauty (Venus, daughter of Dione), because it is a little flowering plant; muscipula, which is Latin for ‘mousetrap,’ because its leaf snaps shut almost instantly when an insect touches one of it’s trigger hairs.
