Question

Which plant is described by these clues? The genus name borrows an Aboriginal word that means roughly 'look around you, keep your eyes open and watch out'. The species epithet is a pun, meaning 'noble' in Latin while also honouring the park officer who first found it. Its woody seed {cone} is a globe of several hundred scales that crumbles apart when ripe, each scale carrying just a single seed. The flat, leathery, strap-shaped leaves have no distinct {midrib}, setting them apart from the needles of most other {conifer} groups. The dark brown {bark} is thick, soft and spongy, studded with rounded {nodules} that earned it a breakfast-cereal nickname. On adult shoots the soft leaves twist into four tidy rows, while young shoots carry them in only two. This {monoecious} tree bears pollen cones and seed cones on the same plant, the pollen ones lower down and both at the tips of side branches. Shoot tips wear a heavy white cap of {resin}, and the tree often sends up many trunks from its base through {coppicing}. Wild trees, reaching 80 to 130 feet (25 to 40 m), cling to a damp sandstone gorge in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, numbering fewer than 100. It was found alive only in September 1994, long after its relatives were known from the fossil record, and its closest kin include the Norfolk Island and bunya trees. Nicknamed the 'dinosaur tree', this secret-gorge survivor from near Sydney is now propagated and sold worldwide to help fund protection of the last wild groves.

Accepted Answer

Wollemia nobilis

Name That Plant #134