Back From Extinction

Thought extinct since dinosaurs roamed the world, the Wollemi Pines were rediscovered, and are now being nurtured back from oblivion.

The hidden canyon where groves of prehistoric Wollemi pines were found [New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service]

IT HAS BEEN CALLED the botanical find of a century: a lonely stand of conifers, the last of their kind and thought to have been extinct for aeons — until three bushwalkers came across them one sunny winter afternoon.

The 23 odd-looking pines, stretching up to 40 metres through the canopy of a deep and inaccessible gorge in Australia’s Wollemi National Park, are from a group that once covered the southern supercontinent of Gondwana.

Now known as ‘Wollemi Pines’, the trees were thought to have disappeared long before humans walked the Earth — until David Noble and his companions stumbled upon them. “They just looked a bit out of the ordinary,” says Nobel. “So I popped a cutting in my pack and took it back home to try and identify it.”

Back at his Blue Mountains home west of Sydney, the keen canyoner and student of botany was unable to match the sample with anything in the textbooks, so he later showed it to Wyn Jones, a colleague at the National Parks and Wildlife Service. Jones has spent most of his life studying rare plants of the Blue Mountains. “I thought that it was just a fern,” he says recalling that morning…