Firefighters save world’s last remaining stand of ‘dinosaur trees’ in Australia

SYDNEY — Australia’s Wollemi Pines survived the dinosaurs, and now firefighters have nursed them through the country’s worst bushfires in generations to live another day.

The giant prehistoric trees were thought to be extinct until 1994, when authorities found 200 of them in a national park near the Blue Mountains north-west of Sydney. Their location — kept secret to protect them from contamination — has been devastated during a bushfire season that has razed about 11 million hectares across the country’s southeast – an area roughly a third the size of Germany – since September.

“We knew we needed to do everything we could to save them,” New South Wales state Environment Minister Matt Kean said.The Gospers Mountain ‘megafire’ wiped out most of the trees’ home in Wollemi National Park, but they emerged virtually unscathed after air tankers dropped fire retardant and firefighters set up irrigation systems to protect them, the government said.

As the fire approached, firefighters were winched in by helicopter to activate the irrigation systems while other aircraft dropped water along the flames’ edge to minimize their impact.Kean did not say when the operation took place, but the state’s Rural Fire Service said this week that, with the arrival of light rains and a dip in temperatures, it had downgraded the Gospers Mountain fire to “under control.

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