Re: [asa] Loading the ark (Ken Ham, Wollemi pine)

The article I referenced earlier from Science News also had a section on the Wollemi pine. Here it is:

"One of the world's rarest trees, the Wollemi pine, inhabits the Australian version of a secure, undisclosed location. This cone-bearing evergreen is not a true pine. Only a few clumps of the tree seem to remain, and they live in an isolated, rugged area inside Wollemi National Park, about 200 kilometers northwest of Sydney. The few scientists and park rangers who know the trees' whereabouts don't reveal their exact locale, says Susan J. Murch, a botanist at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna.

The first members of Araucariaceae, the plant group to which the Wollemi pine belongs, evolved about 200 million years ago, says Murch. The most recent fossil of a close Wollemi pine relative that includes leaves or stems comes from rocks about 93 million years old, she notes. In September 1994, however, David Noble, a botanically knowledgeable park ranger, trekked into a remote, 600-meter-deep gorge and came across trees that he realized were unusual. The trees, dubbed Wollemi pines, were later identified as surviving relatives of a species long presumed extinct-in other words, a Lazarus taxon.
Wollemi pines don't compete well against other tree species and are difficult to grow under modern climatic conditions, says Murch. She describes the few Wollemi pines living in the wild as "a persistent population" that has grown not from seeds but from runners that sprang from older trees and stumps. The largest known specimen could be around 800 years old. Although the mature trees produce seeds, for some reason very few of those seeds sprout.

The pollen of modern-day Wollemi pines provides clues to the trees' ancient distribution, says Macphail. Until about 2 million years ago, similar pollen was common in sediments throughout Australia, New Zealand, and some parts of Antarctica, indicating that the trees' ancient relatives grew widely even though no remains of their leaves or wood had been preserved more recently than 93 million years ago. Then, around the time that Earth's climate began to include periodic ice ages, the species' pollen vanished from the fossil record.

Rather than going extinct, though, Macphail suggests that the trees "simply became so rare that they were easily overlooked." In recent times, the few living Wollemi pines have been protected by their isolation and by the moist conditions in the deep gorge to which they cling. "There's the scant element of chance that [these trees] were found at all," says Macphail. "If, for example, they had been destroyed by wildfires 30 years ago, we'd have never known they were there."

  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Dehler, Bernie
  To: ASA
  Sent: Thursday, November 29, 2007 3:55 PM
  Subject: RE: [asa] Loading the ark (Ken Ham, Wollemi pine)

  Bernie Dehler wrote:

> He also said there was some kind of ancient bush that was found living.

> ancient like dinosaur, and it is like finding a living dinosaur. I need to

> research that one. I can't find the type of bush online right now. Maybe I

> can't find it online now because it was discredited? The video was a few

> years old.

  Dr. David Campbell wrote:

  Might be misrepresenting the Wollemi pine. Fossils were known from

  the Cretaceous, same age as younger dinosaurs. Living ones recently

  discovered in a remote spot in Australia. Study of the living ones

  shows that a distinctive fossil pollen type known from much of the

  Cenozoic (after dinosaurs to the present) also goes with them, so the

  gap between the fossil record and the living ones is much smaller.

  Again, there's nothing about the survival of a species that poses a

  problem for old earth views.

  Hi David,

  You are right. Here's the article:
  "Sensational Australian tree . like 'finding a live dinosaur'"
  http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v17/i2/tree.asp

  Excerpt:
  Professor Carrick Chambers, Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney, has said of the sensational discovery of a type of tree in Australia's Blue Mountains (200 kilometres west of Sydney, in Wollemi National Park) that it was like finding a 'live dinosaur'. This is because the tree, nicknamed the Wollemi pine, is known from fossils classed as so-called Jurassic age around 150 million years ago, but not from fossils in rocks of later periods.

  More info:
  http://www.wollemipine.com/news/Tree_Chic.php

  It is an interesting data-point to see what the best evidence each camp is putting forth to bolster their case.

  .Bernie

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Received on Fri Nov 30 19:59:43 2007