Posted on 09/17/2023 11:05:56 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
The Wollemi pine was thought to have gone extinct 2 million years ago... In 1994, hikers discovered a group of strange trees growing in a canyon in Wollemi National Park, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) west of Sydney, Australia. One hiker notified a park service naturalist, who then showed leaf specimens to a botanist. It was ultimately determined they represented an ancient species that had been essentially frozen in time since dinosaurs roamed Earth.
Called a "living fossil" by some, the Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis) is nearly identical to preserved remains dating to the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago). There are now just 60 of these trees in the wild — and these tenacious survivors are threatened by bushfires in the region. It was thought to have gone extinct around 2 million years ago...
The pine has 26 chromosomes — containing a staggering 12.2 billion base pairs. In comparison, humans have only around 3 billion base pairs...
Indeed, the plants do not exchange much genetic material. The remaining trees appear to reproduce mostly by cloning themselves through coppicing — in which suckers emerge from the base and become new trees.
Their rarity may be partly due to the high number of transposons, or "jumping genes" — stretches of DNA that can change their position within the genome. These elements also account for the genome's size...
As transposons leap to new locations, they can change the sequence of "letters" in a DNA molecule, thus causing or reversing mutations in genes. They may carry functional DNA with them or alter DNA at the site of insertion, and thus have a substantial impact on the evolution of an organism.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
So they didn’t evolve in 2 million years? It’s almost like evolving isn’t a real thing.
How would one replant them?
a tree of ferns?
Air-layering, and I’d imagine that, as with some of the US species that were nearly wiped out, there’s an active breeding project.
https://search.brave.com/search?q=American+Elm+Project
https://search.brave.com/search?q=pawpaw+tree
Thank you for posting the picture. It looks like a cross between a Norfolk pine and a palm tree. I’ve certainly never seen anything quite like that before.
They evolved to perfection & then stopped. /s
There is also a society for American Chestnut trees
Makes great furniture
Yup, that’s the middle link.
They talk too. When the lumberjack got there, they begged, “don’t make a wall of me”.
There needs to be an Island of Misfit Trees.
https://www.gardenia.net/plant/ginkgo-biloba-maidenhair-tree
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dracaena_cinnabari
https://www.tenerife.es/portalcabtfe/en/discover-tenerife/que-ver/el-drago-milenario
Impossible. This litte tree could not have gone extinct 2 million years ago, as there were no SUVs or gas stoves around to ruin the Earff then.
...unless, the Aboriginies hunted them to extinction.
...or something -—
That looks almost like a huge pot plant growing in the background. Some strange kind of symbiotic relationship?
Hey! I’m a lumberjack, and I’m OK!
So, you didn’t read the article, so your criticism isn’t a real thing.
https://www.bhg.com/gardening/plant-dictionary/shrub/sago-palm/
https://plants.ces.ncsu.edu/plants/cycas-revoluta/
Dig a very large, complete rootball, and not cut any roots, or expose them to any air until replanted in semi-shade, and watered-in.
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