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Sydney Morning Herald 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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