wollemi pine
Wollemi Pine is believed to exist in only one location which is within 200 km of the heart of
Sydney, Australia's largest city. There are less than 40 trees. This makes it one of the rarest
plants in the world.
It belongs in the plant family Araucariaceae
but has distinctive features.
However it has very differentfeatures
from any known living pine. Its closest relatives are probably the
extinct
pines which were a dominant feature of the landscape of what is now
Australia
during the Jurassic andCretaceous Periods - between 200 and 65 million
years ago. These pines are known to us only from fossils.
Conifers tend to be dark green but
the leaves of Wollemi Pine are a light green - varying from
bright lime green on younger foliage
to apple green on mature foliage. The leaf structure is
extremely complex and unusual. The
upper branches of the trees are tipped with bright green
female cones and brown, cylindrical,
male cones (the trees are bisexual).
The trunks of Wollemi Pine have a highly
unusual brown, knobby cork-like bark which has led
it to being dubbed 'the Coco Pops tree'.
Indeed it appears to be a true "living
fossil", most closely related to extinct species of
Araucariaceae in the fossil record
in southern Australia about 50 million years ago.
The family Araucariaceae is an important
group in studying the history of our flora.
Araucariaceae had a world-wide distribution
in the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods 200 to 65
million years ago. Since the great
extinctions at the end of the Cretaceous period,
Araucariaceae have survived only in
the southern hemisphere.
The present occurence suggest a
Gondwanic distribution, linked to the time when Australia, New Zealand,
Africa, South
America and India were all parts of
the great supercontinent Gondwana.
Wollemi Pine, is so distinctive that
it represents a new genus and must have been an
evolutionary line distinct from any
other surviving plant group for at least 65 million years.
The new plant is related to Araucaria,
which includes Australia's Hoop Pine and Bunya Pine
and the Norfolk Island Pine, and also
to Agathis including the Kauri Pine of New Zealand.
Wollemi Pine is a conifer ('pine')
whose nearest living relatives are native pines of Australia and
New Zealand: Hoop Pine, Bunya Pine,
and Norfolk Island Pine.
The single known population of Wollemi
Pine is in a rainforest gully within Wollemi National
Park (487,648 ha). This is the State's
largest wilderness area - located West of the Putty Road
between Sydney and the Hunter Valley.
The mature plants are between 27 and
35 metres high with trunks up to 1 metre in diameter.
However the tree can grow taller: one
fallen trunk is 38 metres long.
During the Jurassic Period (208 - 144
million years ago), the continental mass which we call
Australia was part of the great supercontinent
of Gondwana, towgether with Africa, South
America and India. What is now the
east coast of Australia lay close to the South Pole, but
worldwide climates were uniformly warm
to hot and wet.
From the Cretaceous Period (144 - 66.4
million years ago) modern flowering plants began to
evolve and gradually displace the conifers
in the Southern Hemisphere.
Because of the extreme danger to the plant from illegal seed collecting, the location of the population is being kept secret.