A "Jurassic" tree dating from the dinosaur age and long thought to have been extinct for 200 million years has been planted at a park in London by British wildlife expert Sir David Attenborough. One of the rarest trees in the world, the Wollemi Pine was found in Australia by a national parks officer, David Noble, in 1994. The discovery astonished botanists worldwide who had thought the tree died out millions of years ago. "How marvellous and exciting that we should have discovered this rare survivor from such an ancient past," Sir David said as the tree went on public display at Kew Gardens. "It is romantic, I think, that something has survived 200 million years unchanged," he said.
Tony Kirkham, head of the arboretum at Kew, was one of the people allowed to see the tree in its natural habitat in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. "In botanic terms, it is like a zoologist going out and finding a live dinosaur somewhere, a Tyrannosaurus Rex," he said. |