Thirty-five years ago, at the beginning of my research career, I walked for weeks to study populations of the endangered Himalayan goldthread or mishmi teeta (Coptis teeta), an endemic plant in Arunachal Pradesh in the Eastern Himalaya that is used as a potent antimalarial drug by local communities. Himalayan species are intriguing. Like isolated islands, mountain peaks reveal how evolution works: by knowing where unique species concentrate, we can learn how speciation occurs.