In the spring of 1994, David Noble rappelled down the sheer cliff of a narrow canyon, part of a tangled maze of escarpments deeply incised into the sandstone tablelands in Australia’s Wollemi National Park, some 90 miles northwest of Sydney.
In the spring of 1994, David Noble rappelled down the sheer cliff of a narrow canyon, part of a tangled maze of escarpments deeply incised into the sandstone tablelands in Australia’s Wollemi National Park, some 90 miles northwest of Sydney. There, the off-duty National Parks and Wildlife Service officer stumbled upon a strange group of towering trees with distinctive bubbly brown bark and deep green needles and cones. Later called the Wollemi pine, Wollemia nobilis, the species is a member of the ancient Araucariaceae family of conifers and had been presumed extinct for 70-90 million years. It was the equivalent of discovering a Tyrannosaurus still alive on Earth.
Like other scientists working on the knife edge of emergency botany to save critically imperiled plants, Australian conservationists rushed to protect the Wollemi pine within its native habitat, an approach known as in situ conservation. There, a single population of just 45 mature individuals and 46 juveniles survive in the moist rainforest that occurs in deep gorges that have, for eons, been sheltered from wildfires that regularly ravage the dry vegetation atop the plateaus. The critically endangered conifer was an instant target for plant thieves, so the exact location of the trees is a closely guarded secret.
Read More: Yale Environment 360
Wollemi pines, native to Australia, at the Wakehurst botanic garden in Sussex, England. (Photo Credit: Ellen McHale / Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew)
