Okay.
That's a better one.
That's really a new species?
Yeah, there was an article about it...
Towards the end of 1994
explorers found a small grove of ancient trees,
a remnant of a species that was thought to have been extinct
for 65 million years.
It was about as IikeIy as finding a small dinosaur
wandering through the forest.
The trees are among the rarest living things on Earth--
a window into an unimaginably ancient past...
if they survive their discovery.
Their exact location is a closely held secret.
Access is strictly controlled,
clothing and equipment sterilized.
Up until now this wild and dangerous labyrinth
has been protection enough
for many rare and endangered species.
But it is not enough anymore.
This is the Old World.
When Europe was young this was ancient.
When the Grand Canyon was a shallow creek
these valleys looked much as they do today.
Over eons of time Australia evolved
an extraordinary diversity of plants and animals,
a flood of creativity that continued
until the arrival of mankind.
All of the very large animals soon became extinct.
And since the arrival of Europeans
another hundred species of plant and animal have vanished.
Five thousand more are now close to the edge of extinction.
The tallest tree ever measured was a eucalyptus like these,
a mountain ash 435 feet high, 133 meters--
as talI as a 40-story office building.
It was measured by the men who cut it down.
There are no trees of that size in Australia anymore.
Most of the old forests are gone forever.
In 1931 a farmer set about felling these trees.
By chance a group of bushwalkers arrived on the scene
and begged him to stop.
He said he had to make a living.
It was too much to lose.
The bushwalkers offered to buy the land.
They had no money, and it took two years
of desperate struggle to raise the cash.
They gave this forest to the people of New South Wales.
It became the core of the Great National Park.
The leader of that campaign was Miles Dunphy.
He recorded the old names and made these maps.
He shared with his friends an almost ferocious commitment
to saving this place.
They were young, they were from the city,
but they were among the first to realize
that the wilderness did not go on forever.
Their struggle gave us this--
a million hectares where even today
it is possible to walk where no one has ever walked before,
to take your life into your own hands.
Woo, down there, go, go, go, go, go!
Whoa, woo!
Woo!
Jump, come on, jump!
Woo!
Deep in this wilderness
it is still possible to be confronted
by the paradox of the platypus--
the furry monotreme with a duck's bill
and webbed feet that lays eggs,
but feeds milk to its babies after they have hatched.
Platypus are rare now,
gone from the pools and creeks where they were once common.
Wilderness is a spell that is easily broken.
A few farms, a mine,
a single road can rob vast tracts of land
of that elusive magic,
that memory of the world when it was young.
Most of AustraIia's wilderness
is where you would expect it to be--
far from the farms
and even further from the sprawling cities.
But in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales
there is an extraordinary exception
right next to the biggest city of all.
Sydney is a city of four million people
spreading inexorably westward
since the earliest days of European settlement.
It has already consumed a million hectares
of coastal plain.
But at the mountain wall
the city stops.
For ancient Australia, the great sandstone walls
were the walls of the century.
But to the new settlers of the coastal plain,
the thousand-meter escarpment was simply a barrier
standing between the colony and its future.
In 1813 after many failed expeditions into the valleys
three settlers followed the ridge tops
and were able to ride their horses across.
They were hailed as heroes.
The journey was uneventful
and seems to have followed an Aboriginal trade route.
But for the new colony, it was a defining moment.
Convict laborers cut through the rock,
built the bridges, and opened the road
to the deceptively limitless pastures of the Golden West.
The fragile ancient grasslands were devastated
by European livestock and European methods.
Wilderness was there to be tamed.
...sinking low
And a world where golden glow
I'm a-thinking dear of you
And those happy days we knew
In 1901 Australia became a nation,
and Australians began to embrace the challenge
of being a new people in a new and different land,
began to lose their uneasiness with this strange place,
to appreciate the wilderness--
the "bush" as they called it--
for its own innate qualities,
not for any fancied resemblance
to the Europe they'd left behind.
Some had learned to see it and to love it for itself,
but most still saw the land through European eyes.
The clearing of native vegetation
was seen as a simple expression of advancing civilization.
And on the rare patches of volcanic soil
the settlers did their best
to pretend that they were still at home.
In the transplanted English culture
of traditional Australia,
the word "garden" meant a piece of land
from which every trace of native vegetation had been removed
and universally replaced with the flowers and trees
of 19th-century Europe.
In their determination to build a new England in the South Seas,
the settlers staunchly refused to notice
that rainfall followed no pattern at all,
that the patches of fertile soil were small and rare.
They had come to live in an ancient desert,
the fossil soil long ago leached of its nutrients,
and the wayward climate
lay down the unbreakable law for this land:
Every living thing must be tough
and economical and ingenious if it is to survive.
Life responded to this challenge
with fantastic inventiveness,
throwing up more than twice as many species
as in the more fertile lands of Europe.
But there is a plant or animal
for every conceivable ecological niche,
no matter how small or tenuous it might be.
The wombat is one of the worId's great energy misers.
It can weigh as much as a sheep,
but achieves that size eating only a third as much.
Kangaroos and wallabies evolved hopping
as the most energy efficient way of covering large distances.
In such an unpredictable environment
it is important to be ready for bad times,
but also to be ready for good.
Female kangaroos are almost constantly pregnant.
They carry a supply of fertilized eggs
and a developing embryo
so that they can quickly produce an offspring
if a season seems promising.
A koala copes with the scarcity of resources
by doing very little.
It avoids competition
by eating nothing but the leaves of a few species of gum tree.
But if those particular leaves are unavailable, the koala dies.
In evolving to perfectly fit one small ecological niche
it has cut off all escape.
These dwarf pine trees
evolved to live in the spray of this waterfall
and four others.
If the habitat is lost, so is the species.
The streams of the plateau flow away from the present,
away from the merely ancient.
They fall into the abyss of time.
The streams lead us into the world
as it was 90 million years ago.
The only way of getting to that world
is to go through the canyons.
There's no other way.
Okay?
Yeah.
Still going.
Following this route into the past
demands experience and careful preparation.
Here, this is amazing.
At least four people have died in this canyon.
It was a group of bushwalkers in search of the ultimate canyon
that made the most amazing botanical discovery
of the century...
the Wollemi Pine,
a totally unexpected survivor from the time of the dinosaurs.
When these trees ruled the forests
the ancestors of the human race were the size of mice.
The future for the trees is terribly uncertain.
They are less than an hour by helicopter
from the center of Sydney.
A small fire or an unfamiliar disease
could quickly wipe out the entire species.
The film crew was cut to the minimum
and offered to wear blindfolds for the flight in
to ensure that they could not-- even accidentally--
reveal the location.
The trees look like nothing else in the forest.
They grow to more than 35 meters,
more than 120 feet high.
Only in such a wilderness
could they have remained undiscovered for so long.
From the improvised helipad
the way leads straight down a cliff,
200 meters to the floor of the canyon
that is the only sanctuary on Earth for the survivors
of a family that dominated the world's forests
for 100 milIion years.
Fewer than 40 adult trees have been found.
They are a kind of platypus of a tree.
They are pines but they have fronds like a palm tree
and their bark is alive,
as if covered in a million sprouting tips.
It is not known whether the species
has fallen below the genetic threshold
that would permit survival in the wild.
The survivors are monitored and protected with great care.
But as a final line of defense,
scientists have carefully nurtured seeds and cuttings,
and already the species is more numerous
in the laboratory than in the wild.
Looks viable.
But the ancient trees still make their own bid
for immortality.
This was probably the first time in the history of the Earth
that human beings watched these trees shed their spore.
We don't even know if it happens every year.
We have everything to learn.
All over the world the huddled remnants of the wild young Earth
are desperately threatened,
going or already gone.
Even in Australia one of every four species
has become rare and endangered as the wilderness goes,
and the world becomes a poorer place.
It is not easy to be optimistic,
but it is possible to hope
that a generation may grow up
to be as tough and ingenious and creative
as the other living creatures that have evolved in this place
and learned to live lightly on the land.