In September 1994, a field officer with the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service named David Noble was spending his days off doing what he usually did: exploring the deep sandstone canyons of Wollemi National Park, a rugged wilderness about 150 kilometres north-west of Sydney. Lowering himself into a gorge that few people had ever entered, he came across a stand of tall trees with strange, bubbled bark and unfamiliar foliage. Noble was an experienced bushwalker with a good knowledge of Australian plants, and he could not place them. He took a cutting back to Sydney, expecting to be told it was something common that he had simply failed to recognise. He was wrong. Botanists who examined the cutting concluded that the tree belonged to the Araucariaceae, an ancient family that includes the monkey puzzle and the kauri, but that it matched no living species. It was given the name Wollemia nobilis, after both the park and its finder. The discovery was announced to the public the following year, and it was immediately compared to finding a small dinosaur still alive in a paddock. Fossils closely related to the tree had been recovered from rocks laid down when dinosaurs were still the dominant land animals, and until 1994 the group had been assumed to have vanished from the continent long ago. What made the find remarkable was not only the tree's age as a lineage but its scarcity. Fewer than one hundred mature trees were counted in the wild, growing in a handful of adjacent gorges. Genetic testing later suggested that the surviving population was extraordinarily uniform, which is what one would expect of a species that had passed through a period when very few individuals remained. A population of that size, in one small area, is precariously placed: a single fire, or a single disease, could remove it entirely. The response of the authorities was unusual. Rather than publicising the location, they concealed it, and they have kept it concealed ever since. Only a small number of researchers are permitted to visit, and they must follow strict hygiene procedures. The reason is not mainly the risk of souvenir hunters, real though that is, but a soil-borne organism called Phytophthora cinnamomi, which attacks plant roots and is spread easily on boots and equipment. A single careless visitor could carry it into the gorge. At the same time, an apparently contradictory decision was taken: the tree would be propagated and sold. Cuttings were grown commercially, and from 2006 Wollemi pines could be bought by members of the public and planted in gardens, parks and botanic collections around the world. The logic was that a species scattered across thousands of private gardens on several continents cannot be wiped out by one catastrophe in one valley, and that the income from sales could pay for the protection of the wild grove. Conservationists who had spent their careers arguing against the commercial trade in rare plants found themselves, in this case, supporting it. The wisdom of that decision was tested in the summer of 2019 and 2020, when fires of exceptional intensity burned across eastern Australia, including Wollemi National Park. As the fire front approached the gorge, firefighters were flown in to install an irrigation system among the trees, and aircraft dropped retardant along the rim of the canyon to slow the flames. The operation was carried out with the location still undisclosed. Most of the grove survived; a small number of trees were lost. It was, by any measure, an extraordinary amount of effort to expend on fewer than a hundred trees in a valley almost nobody is allowed to see. Whether that effort was proportionate is a fair question, and it is asked regularly. The Wollemi pine is not a keystone species; nothing else in the forest depends on it. The money spent protecting it would have bought a great deal of ordinary habitat somewhere else. The counter-argument is that some things are valued not for what they do but for what they are, and that a lineage which has persisted, unnoticed, through the extinction of almost everything that once grew alongside it is worth the inconvenience of keeping alive.