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Sydney Morning Herald
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Found: Tree From The Dinosaur Age, And It's Alive
By James Woodford
Environment Writer
12/14/1994
Sydney Morning Herald
1
Copyright of John Fairfax Group Pty Ltd
Only a few times this century has something
so spectacular as the Wollemi pine turned up - a living fossil
that has miraculously survived the ravages of unimaginable time in its own
little Jurassic Park in the Blue Mountains.
The previously unknown native tree is a
towering 40 metres tall, with a three-metre girth, is covered in dense, waxy
foliage and has distinctive bubbly bark that makes it look as though it is
coated in Coco Pops.
Missing for 150 million years, its
discovery in a remote gorge in Wollemi National Park, 200 kilometres west of
Sydney, has astonished scientists.
Its only known home is a tiny 5,000 square
metre relic grove of prehistoric rainforest in the 500,000-hectare park. So far
only 23 adults and 16 juveniles have been found, making it also one of the
world's rarest plants.
Once the trees may have covered vast areas
of the continent, but as the climate changed the trees apparently retreated into
the damp, protected gorge: they have somehow hung on through millions of years
of massive climatic change and terrible aridity in more recent prehistoric
times, when countless other plants perished.
"The discovery is the equivalent of finding
a small dinosaur still alive on Earth," said Professor Carrick Chambers, the
director of the Royal Botanic Gardens. "It is a really major find."
The scientific director at the gardens, Dr
Barbara Briggs, said: "On the world scene it's one of the most outstanding
discoveries of the century."
The few scientists who have been alerted to
the find so far have put it on a par with the rediscovery of the lungfish in
south-east Queensland in 1870, or the coelacanth in the depths of the Indian
Ocean in 1938: both fish had previously been known only from 385
million-year-old fossils.
The Wollemi pine was
discovered in August by Mr David Noble, a project officer with the National
Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), who was spending his weekend in the park. He
was canyoning in a 600-metre-deep gorge when the big trees caught his eye. He
brought a branch back to show to Mr Wyn Jones, a senior naturalist with the
NPWS.
After a cursory glance, Mr Jones told Mr
Noble that he thought the branch was from a fern. "No," Mr Noble said, "It's
from a bloody great big tree."
Mr Jones first saw the trees in the wild a
fortnight later.
"My reaction was amazement," Mr Jones said,
"I had never seen anything like it."
Since then Mr Noble, who may have the tree
scientifically named after him, Mr Jones and a volunteer, Ms Jan Allen, have
made several trips to study the trees.
Today the NSW Government, the NPWS and the
Royal Botanic Gardens will formally declare that the Wollemi Pine
is a new genus - the scientific classification used to embrace a group of
similar species.
Final identification of the genus was done
by Mr Ken Hill, senior botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens. "When you can find
40-metre-high trees 200 kilometres from a major city it makes you wonder what
else is out there in places that are even more remote," Mr Hill said.
The only trees like it that have existed on
Earth are found in fossils deposited during the time of the dinosaurs. The genus
is midway between New Zealand's kauri pines and Australia's Norfolk and hoop
pines.
"This tree is a missing link between the
kauri pines and the araucaria pines (includes hoop, bunya and Norfolk Pines) it
will fill in a whole lot of gaps in our knowledge," said Mr Hill.
Scientists from the Gardens are trying to
propagate it as a precaution against collectors stealing seeds or a natural
disaster such as a bushfire.
Fewer than 10 people know the location of
the trees. "It's going to be one of the stunning conifers of the world," said Mr
Hill.
PAGE 8: The chance discovery; waiting
wildlife.
BACK FROM THE DEAD: RECENT REDISCOVERIES
WOLLEMI PINE
Fossil Record: 150 million years old
Found: Aug 1994, Wollemi National Park
DAWN REDWOOD
Fossil Record: 70 million years old
Found: 1945, Sichuan provinvce China
BONDEGEZOU (tree kangaroo)
Found: June 1994, Maokop Range, Irian Jaya
COELACANTH
Fossil Record: 385 million years old
Found: 1938, Madagascar Trench
LUNGFISH
Fossil Record: 385 million years old
Discovered: 1870, Burnett and Mary rivers,
SE Qld
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