Prickly caterpillar plant
Scorpiurus muricatus
Family · Fabaceae · Harmless
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The legume whose fruit is a perfect caterpillar: a spiral-coiled green pod covered in knobs, fooling anyone at first sight and once used as a joke at dinner tables.
Fields and pasture · Roadsides and waste ground · Town and roadside · Scrubland
Also known ascaterpillar plant, scorpion's tail
How to tell it
A prostrate plant with simple, entire, elongated leaves, unlike almost every legume. Small yellow flowers, one to five on a long stalk. The fruit is unmistakable: coiled in a tight spiral, green, covered in rows of knobs or soft spines, exactly like a caterpillar.
What it is confused with
No dangerous lookalikes known in the Iberian Peninsula.
What it is for
No direct food use, but it is valued forage and a soil-improving plant. It is worth it as a demonstration: it is a legume with a simple leaf, which breaks the easy rule that legumes always have compound leaves.
Where it occurs
Each square is an area with recorded observations of this plant. The lighter background is the set of areas where any of the entries has been observed, and serves as a reference. Note what this is not: it is not where the plant lives, it is where people record it, so trails and towns always look fuller than the mountains. Data from GBIF.
Sources
Community
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