In 1994, a bushwalker rappelling into a sandstone canyon 150 kilometres from Sydney found a stand of trees with waxy bubbled bark that matched fossils 90 million years old, and the Wollemi pine turned out to be a species everyone had assumed died with the dinosaurs

In 1994, a bushwalker rappelling into a sandstone canyon 150 kilometres from Sydney found a stand of trees with waxy bubbled bark that matched fossils 90 million years old, and the Wollemi pine turned out to be a species everyone had assumed died with the dinosaurs

Roughly 150 kilometres north-west of Sydney, at the bottom of a narrow sandstone canyon in Wollemi National Park, stands a grove of trees with bark like bubbling chocolate and needles arranged in flat sprays. A 2020 census counted 89 wild plants across four sites in a single canyon system. Forty-six of them were mature. That is the entire wild population of the species, worldwide. In September 1994, a New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife …