This beautiful image is the opened mature fruit of cotton, Gossypium. The fruit has four valves, revealing for locules, each filled with a cotton ball with seeds. The photosynthetic bracts are persistent, so they cover the basal half of the fruit. Black dots on the bracts and fruit valves are the glands that produce the gossypol. Tips of the valves are hard and very pointed, so this is the object that stabbed pickers as they attempted to remove the cotton balls during slavery days.

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