Australia Firefighters Save the Only Wild Prehistoric Wollemi Pines on Earth

The Wollemi pines once grew widely across Australia from more than 100 to 60 million years ago, The Washington Post reported. But now less than 200 remain in the wild, in a national park 125 miles northwest of Sydney.

"It's something like the Opera House of the natural world," Richard Kingsford, director of the Center for Ecosystem Science at the University of New South Wales (NSW), told The Sydney Morning Herald. "Losing it would have added to the catastrophe we have seen elsewhere."

The Wollemi Pines outlasted the dinosaurs and thanks to the mammoth efforts of NPWS they look like they will survive these bushfires.