IRRI is celebrating the 50th anniversary of IR8, one of the more important crop varieties ever produced by plant breeders, with a neat timeline of the history of its development and impact.
I was going to include a pedigree of the thing, but, alas, the International Rice Information System seems to be down at the time of writing. Oh well.
LATER: National Geographic to the rescue with that IR8 pedigree.
Pedigree of IR8 is pretty straightforward, with little tracking back to three landraces:
Dee Geo Woo Gen x Peta (Cina ((i.e. China)) x Latisail)
For rice nerds who want more, pedigrees of all IR varieties are available here: books.irri.org/9712202062_content.pdf