The Wollemi pine, a plant from Jurassic times, is one of the world's oldest and rarest tree species belonging to a 200-million-year-old plant family. It was known from fossil records and presumed extinct until it was discovered in 1994 by David Noble, a field officer with the National Parks and Wildlife Service, in the Wollemi National Park just some 150 km west of Australia's biggest city, Sydney. Professor Carrick Chambers, director of Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens, said at the time of the discovery that it was "the equivalent of finding a small dinosaur still alive on Earth".

The Wollemi pine is a genus of coniferous tree in the family Araucariaceae. This majestic evergreen conifer possesses unusual pendulous dark green foliage. Its branches have two ranks of leaves, and its dark brown bark looks like bubbling chocolate. They can grow up to 40 meters high in the wild with a trunk diameter of over 1 meter, and survive temperatures from -5 to 45℃.

The Wollemi pine is rare and endangered. Less than 100 adult trees are known to exist in the wild now, according to the Australian Government. Thus, research into its biology and cultivation is being widely conducted by botanists and horticultural experts in Australia to safeguard its continued survival.

Only a select few researchers are permitted to see the Wollemi pine in the wild. Yet, there are several sites outside Australia where you can see a young propagated one. The Museum was lucky enough to receive a young Wollemi pine as a gift from the Australian government in February, 2005. And now, this living fossil is flushing in its new "home."