IT HAS been called the botanical find of the 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. 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.”