Jurassic-era trees have grown in Tasmania for millions of years. Now they face their biggest threat: fire
Steve Leonard finds it hard when he goes bushwalking in Tasmania's high country these days. 'I look at a stand of pencil pine and I wonder: 'how long will you be there?''
The ecologist is just back from a rapid survey of the cost to ancient trees of the latest lightning-strike fires across the island's drying landscapes. Among the losses he found near the overland track, an alpine walking trail through central Tasmania, were groves of pencil pine.
'We saw a couple of stands that were quite severely burned,' says Leonard, from the Tasmanian National Parks and Wildlife Service. 'Others where the fires had taken out single trees.' This wizard-bearded scientist spoke the fears of many: that tree-by-tree natural antiquity is being consumed.
Only found in Tasmania, pencil pine dates back to the late Jurassic, 140 million years ago. It is from the small Athrotaxis genus, with King Billy pine and a third species that crosses between them called the Lax-leaf. If allowed, these trees can live a thousand years.
Unlike eucalypts, they are hypersensitive to fire; if burned around the trunk, they die. And Tasmania is in a new age of fire.
Pencil pine has an absorbingly varied character which reflects its landscape, shaped by wind, ice and snow. The bark is soft and yielding, its waxy leaves kind to running fingers.
I have seen it outlined at sundown, making a trail along a watercourse like a clan on a centuries-long journey. Marvelled on a mountain plateau where the trees' windward stems have been ice-stripped of bark, yet shelter stems of new life. And I've been held spellbound on a glacial shelf where a pine crawls up a boulder, live branchlets rising barely a hand's breadth above the rock.
I have imagined pencil pines sculptural groves offering permanence through generations of Palawa who have lived on the island for thousands of years, the shelter across riskier altitudes they would have offered. After invasion it was regarded as so 'remarkably handsome' that its first colonial name was pine of Olympus.
Woodlands of pencil pine are now rare. The tree persists in rock-guarded fortresses like the walls of Jerusalem and the labyrinth; a reminder of what once stood before wide-scale burning. Mostly now pencil pines live as remnants, finding just enough nourishment to huddle in fireproof boulder fields or to edge wet shorelines.
A century ago the poet Marie Pitt, who lived through bushfire on a mountain mining hamlet, wrote of people unleashing 'A gallop of fire':
I loose the horses, the wild, red horses
I loose the horses, the mad, red horses
And terror is on the land.
The burning was to clear Tasmanian land for access and prospecting, and later to encourage livestock grazing.
Pitt's words stand eerily today as a description of the red horses of global heating, which have brought lightning-started fires across whole Tasmanian landscapes in 2013, 2016, 2020, and now in 2025. These latest fires, now burning into a fifth week, are again exceeding our ability to protect these ancient trees.
A tree like Huon pine, renowned for its long-lasting scented timber, can more often be found today confined to pockets of landscape that are less likely to burn: south-facing hillsides, for example, sheltered from the predominant northerly wind-blown fires.
In his 21 February helicopter survey, Leonard flew west to the Harman River, where deep concern was held for a Huon pine stand that included a tree ring counted to 2,500 years of annual growth – not including its rotten centre, which might have held another 500 rings. Fire had burned to the edges of this stand in a steep river valley.
'It's a tall, single stem tree. It sticks up out of the canopy in the rainforest. It's a really nice looking tree. It was unharmed.' Other, big, Huon further downriver did burn, leaving a ghastly catalogue for Rob Blakers, a nature photographer, to record.
Touchstones from the deep past such as the Huon and pencil pines give each of us pause to contemplate our own temporary existence. I was drawn to these trees during my recovery from stage 4 metastatic lung cancer, our joint struggles for life an inspiration to me.
I have the medical breakthrough of immunotherapy to thank for my second life. Surely human ingenuity can be turned to protect this rich heritage of trees too.
On the afternoon of 3 February, 1,227 lightning strikes hit the ground in a sweep across the island. Nineteen fires lit up within hours in the north-west but one in the south of the state didn't. It stayed smouldering near Mount Picton for a few days, then burst into flame.
Within minutes its smoke was reported by a remote AI-trained camera set on a nearby mountaintop; a little swarm of Fire Boss water bombers flew out to it and began dumping. Helicopters followed and winched down remote area firefighters. Together they stopped the burn at a few hectares.
But this is just a hopeful sign. The 2025 fires have left a patchwork of burnt ground across 98,500 hectares of wild country.
Richard Dakin, the deputy incident controller with the National Parks and Wildlife Service, says the fire which took out the pencil pine near the overland track was nearly held back by Fire Bosses – fire fighting float planes – skimming water out of nearby Lake St Clair. Lakes and coastal bays are on the side of the ancients.
But Tasmania is an island in the southern ocean. Strong winds and cloud are usual, and the skimmers could not hold the fire's perimeter.
Instead, the fire headed north toward more rich flora, including a very old King Billy pine forest and – in the distance – Cradle Mountain itself. 'We had to throw everything at it,' Dakin sais.
NSW fire service large air tankers dropped a 2.5km fire-retardant line; water bombers campaigned from the lakes; and remote firefighters worked at arduous, grimy 'old-school' firefighting, flailing and digging at the perimeter. 'The combination of the three led to success,' Dakin says.
Their campaign rolls on, the full losses of the ancients yet to be tallied. But already we know for certain that after millions of years on Earth, and living only in Tasmania, these trees will need our help if they are to have a place in a heated future.
Andrew Darby is the author of The Ancients, published by Allen & Unwin and available now
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BBC News
25-04-2025
- BBC News
Dire wolves and woolly mammoths: Why scientists are worried about de-extinction
The creation of three "dire wolf" pups has raised hopes that it may be possible to resurrect extinct animals. But some scientists have grave concerns. When news broke that Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas-based biotechnology company, had resurrected three extinct dire wolves, the internet reacted with awe. It is a species that last roamed the earth some 13,000 years ago, but has found recent fame thanks to Game of Thrones, which features fictional dire wolves. The story was stoked further when a photograph of Game of Thrones author George R R Martin holding one of the adorable white pups was released. "I have to say the rebirth of the direwolf has stirred me as no scientific news has since Neil Armstrong [walked] on the moon," Martin wrote on his blog. Martin, who is an investor in Colossal, added that more extinct species were on the way, including the woolly mammoth, Tasmanian tiger and dodo. Colossal – which is currently valued at $10bn (£7.6bn) and is backed by high-profile donors such as Chris Hemsworth, Paris Hilton and the CIA – boldly states on its website that it's "going to fix" the problem of extinction. According to Matt James, the company's chief animal officer, the aim is not to create a Jurassic Park-like zoo full of extinct animals, but to reintroduce lost species back into the habitats they once occupied. Once those animals are settled in, Colossal expects them to exert positive change on their habitats. "We're trying to focus on species that can have cascading effects on an ecosystem to improve stability, lift biodiversity and maybe even help with climate change buffering," James tells the BBC. De-extinction has been talked about for decades. But Colossal's three dire wolves – which are actually grey wolves that possess 20 edited genes that are meant to give them dire wolf-like features – represent the most serious effort to date to make that lofty vision a reality. In the wake of the dire wolf announcement, however, many scientists have criticised Colossal's approach. They see efforts to bring back long-extinct species as costly wastes of resources and a distraction from the significant work that's needed to save still-living species. The BBC spoke with several experts in fields ranging from conservation biology to paleontology about efforts to resurrect species from extinction and whether they are likely to achieve the goals that Colossal hopes. Chief among the concerns raised was that claiming it is possible to bring back extinct species may actually lead to more existing species being lost. It could give politicians and industries the idea that damage to the environment can be fixed by resurrecting species. Such a message could be particularly damaging at a time when the US is withdrawing from international agreements on climate change and revoking measures intended protect the environment and wildlife, says David Shiffman, a marine conservation biologist and independent consultant based in Washington, DC. "It's beyond irresponsible for these people [Colossal] to be claiming some sort of conservation victory in this environment," he says. This worry was quickly reinforced when Doug Burgum, the US Secretary of the Interior – who the Colossal team met with in advance of their dire wolf announcement – praised the company's work on X as a new "bedrock for modern species conservation". Burgum also criticised the ineffectiveness of the "endangered species list" – presumably a reference to the Red List of Threatened Species, drawn up by the International Union of Conservation (IUCN) or the list of threatened & endangered species maintained by branches of the US Government – thanks to what he characterised as a focus on regulation. "Since the dawn of our nation, it has been innovation – not regulation – that has spawned American greatness," he wrote. Super-cool science Biodiversity is under a seemingly endless onslaught of threats, virtually all of which are imposed by humans. The leading reasons, according to the IUCN, are habitat destruction, invasive species, overexploitation from fishing and hunting, illegal wildlife trade, pollution and climate change. Colossal claims that its de-extinction work will directly benefit conservation. But the company needs to tie its work to "ameliorating, alleviating or reversing something that's on that list" of threats to biodiversity, says Kent Redford, former director of the Wildlife Conservation Society who now works as an independent conservation consultant in Portland, Maine. While Colossal's de-extinction work is "super-cool science," he continues, he does not see it alleviating any of the threats highlighted by the IUCN. Colossal sees things otherwise. The company states on its website that woolly mammoths reintroduced to the Arctic, for example, will increase those habitats' resilience to climate change through their foraging behavior, which they say will help to keep carbon locked in permafrost in the ground. By scraping away snow, the company says, mammoths will expose the soil below to cold air, causing it to stay frozen. However, Nitin Sekar, a conservation scientist with the Asian elephant specialist group at the IUCN, says he has struggled to find evidence in the scientific literature to support this claim. One study comparing carbon storage in the Arctic tundra to taiga forest found the soil in areas covered in trees could store nearly twice as much carbon overall. Only slightly more was found in the permafrost of the tundra than in the taiga. Nor could he find anything else about how mammoths might have affected carbon in general. Some research on existing species of arctic herbivores suggests that they can reduce permafrost thawing. One scoping study by researchers at the University of Oxford does point to the role mammoths had on the climate during the Pleistocene and suggests bison and horses could replicate some of that role. But those species need to be maintained at high densities – where they are fenced, fed and managed by humans – to have any protective effect. The Arctic ecosystem is also different today than it was in the Pleistocene, so it is also hard to say whether mammoth hybrids would have that same effect on today's landscape as species like caribou and reindeer. There could be other ways that mammoths affect carbon levels. As temperatures increase, the act of trampling and scraping away snow could actually accelerate permafrost melting by exposing it to the Sun – an effect that some research suggests is already happening in wet lowlands in the Arctic. "Overall, with the data we have now, it's just impossible to know how mammoths affected their environment millennia ago, or how the mammoth-elephant hybrids will behave in our warmer future," Sekar says. "It seems like a strange thing to gamble on in the face of an existential crisis, given the alternatives." James calls for more research to resolve these questions and show "direct links and causation in a way that can help to bring the rest of the scientific community along on this journey". Dire wolves and woolly mammoths were driven extinct by the complex forces of a changing planet, not just by human activities. For species that humans are responsible for annihilating, though, simply bringing them back does not help to address the threats that pushed them to extinction in the first place, says Corinne Kendall, programme director for Southern Africa at the Peregrine Fund, a non-profit organisation that aims to conserve birds of prey around the world. Modern conservationists recognise this and are increasingly focused on landscape-level solutions rather than saving a particular favourite species, Kendall adds. "That's what's missing in the way Colossal is approaching this," she says. "If you only address the genetics and technology side of things, it's interesting from a scientific discovery standpoint, but you're creating the trees without the forest." Julie Meachen, a vertebrate paleontologist and morphologist at Des Moines University in Iowa, believes, however, that the genetic techniques Colossal used to create its dire wolves are applicable to conservation. The company is also exploring ways to help still-living species such as the northern white rhino, elephants and endangered pigeons, she points out. "These techniques could be applied to any species suffering from genetic diversity loss and to combat inbreeding or genetic bottlenecks in low population sizes," she says. "I think the conservation work that Colossal is doing is far more important than the de-extinction work, but this conservation work does not get the same press coverage as the flashy de-extinction part," she adds. "That is unfortunate." James at Colossal agrees that de-extinction technologies are just "one piece of a very complex puzzle" that must also include things like habitat protection. But he says that attention-grabbing headlines about extinct species being brought back to life can act like "a giant ship" pulling "all these other projects in its wake". Nature and nurture It is also important to be clear about what Colossal is actually able to achieve. It is unlikely to ever be possible to truly resurrect long-gone species like dire wolves or woolly mammoths, say scientists not involved with the company. Tissue samples from animals that have been extinct for tens of thousands of years lack the intact cells needed for traditional cloning techniques, says Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist at the University of Maine. "What Colossal is engaging in is genetic modification of modern species to give them physical characteristics to make them look like extinct species." This in itself is a significant technical achievement, argues Colossal and its supporters. In the case of the dire wolves, the three puppies it managed to breed are in reality "genetically modified grey wolves", say researchers. Essentially the genome of modern wolves was edited to replicate small segments of ancient DNA obtained from the fossilised remains of dire wolves. They are, the company admits, grey wolves with dire wolf characteristics. But scientists have even questioned some of those unlikely, for example, that dire wolves would have been white, but Colossal chose to make its animals white "because of popular conceptions from Game of Thrones", Gill says. "This was an aesthetic choice, not a biological or scientific one." Even if Colossal did bring back animals that very closely resembled Ice Age species, they still would not be the same as the bona fide ones that lived thousands of years ago because the Pleistocene ecosystem they inhabited no longer exists, Meachen says. "A dire wolf or any other species is not only its genes, but also its environment and all the other species living there." Colossal says it has no plans of releasing dire wolves into the wild. But it does aspire to eventually repopulate parts of the Arctic with woolly mammoths. This would require engineering a lot of baby mammoth proxies, which the company plans to do by using Asian or African elephants as surrogates. In the West especially, though, some people are starting to question the ethics of whether elephants – extremely intelligent, social and sentient beings – should be kept in captivity at all, much less be experimented on, Sekar says. Asian elephants in modern zoo facilities also frequently suffer from infertility and lose their calves to stillbirths and infanticides twice as often as elephants in semi-wild conditions, he says, while mothers deeply mourn dead calves. "Are we really ok putting elephants through that so we can have these visually entertaining animals that aren't even real mammoths?" asks Sekar. James says that Colossal will have many quality control steps to ensure things go well for the elephants, and that the company will also be working with leading animal welfare experts to "avoid potential welfare pitfalls ahead". Lack of returns Colossal has not disclosed how much it invested in the dire wolf programme – but it's likely in the many millions of dollars. While costs of new technologies do eventually go down with scale, even if de-extinction does get cheaper, it will still be orders of magnitude more affordable and effective to stop species from going extinct in the first place, Shiffman says. Moreover, if the original drivers of extinction are not addressed, then de-extinct species could quickly become re-extinct, he warns. While Redford acknowledges that money is not fungible, if Colossal's primary goal really is conservation, then he says he has a hard time viewing its work on de-extinction as being "the right investment to make". For every extinct species that Colossal is bringing back, however, James says the company is also investing in a surviving endangered species. Work is being done to introduce greater genetic diversity to populations of endangered red wolves in the US, for example, and to engineer elephants to be resistant to herpes virus. But while red wolves do have some issues with genetic diversity, their biggest threats are road collisions and human persecution, Kendall says. Without addressing "how the animal is going to survive on the ground", the genetic component becomes "kind of irrelevant". Herpes also only kills a fraction of the number of wild Asian elephants each year compared to those killed by humans, says Sekar, who is planning to publish data from the Indian government about causes of elephant deaths. Around eight wild elephants die per year of herpes compared to around 100 killed in some way by humans, he says. Colossal could leverage its synthetic biology expertise in ways that are clear wins for the planet, experts say. Crops that are engineered to more efficiently take up nitrogen, for example, could be a huge boon for reducing the steep climate costs of nitrogen fertiliser and lessening the major dead zones that its runoffs cause in water bodies. Finding ways to engineer high quality animal proteins for human consumption could, likewise, be a game-changer for alleviating the many environmental and animal welfare concerns that plague the livestock industry, the experts say. "Colossal clearly has very talented biologists on their team," Sekar says. "If they were to turn their attention to addressing problems like that, they could really be the heroes of conservation." -- For essential climate news and hopeful developments to your inbox, sign up to the Future Earth newsletter, while The Essential List delivers a handpicked selection of features and insights twice a week. For more science, technology, environment and health stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X and Instagram.
Telegraph
08-04-2025
- Telegraph
Scientists dispute Game of Thrones wolves brought back from extinction
Scientists have disputed a bioscience firm's claims to have resurrected the extinct dire wolf more than 10,000 years after the species disappeared from the Earth. Colossal Bioscience, a $10billion private company, professes to have 'restored a once-eradicated species' by genetically engineering three pups using ancient DNA found in fossils from between 11,500 and 72,000 years ago. One of the animals, named Remus, featured on the cover of Time magazine this week alongside the words: 'he's a dire wolf'. But experts have questioned the firm's claims, saying that while the birth of the three wolves is a significant achievement, it is not the same as bringing a species back to life. 'It's not a direwolf,' Vincent Lynch, professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Buffalo, told The Telegraph. 'Direwolves went extinct, what they've done is cloned a gray wolf and introduced some genetic changes that make it superficially resemble the dire wolf', he said. He added: 'It is disingenuous. They're doing this to get public engagement. They're doing this to get free, friendly press... they won't get that kind of coverage, if they're being intellectually honest, and say that we've made a cloned gray wolf that has some genetic changes that make it look like a dire wolf.' Colossal, a Dallas-based firm, claims to be the 'world's first and only de-extinction company', with its mission to bring back extinct animals including the woolly mammoth, the dodo and the Tasmanian tiger. For its work on the dire wolf, the scientists made 20 edits in 14 genes of the common grey wolf's 19,000 genes. The edited embryos were implanted in surrogate dog mothers, with the wolves born by planned caesarean section to minimise the risk of complications. The genetic tweaks gave the animals a white coat, larger, more powerful shoulders, larger teeth and a change in its howl and whine. Colossal is keeping the pups, named Khaleesi, Romulus and Remus, on a private 2,000-acre facility at an undisclosed location in the northern US. 'On October 1, 2024, for the first time in human history, Colossal successfully restored a once-eradicated species through the science of de-extinction', the firm said on its website, referring to the birth of Romulus. 'After a 10,000+ year absence, our team is proud to return the dire wolf to its rightful place in the ecosystem. Colossal's innovations in science, technology and conservation made it possible to accomplish something that's never been done before: the revival of a species from its longstanding population of zero.' But several scientists dispute the company's claims. 'They're communicating this as de-extinction, that they've brought the dire wolf back... but it was not de-extinction, what they did was animal engineering', Neil Shubin, professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago, told The Telegraph. 'They didn't necessarily bring a creature back with its full genetic code. What they did was engineer living animals with particular traits inside them. And, and in that case, it's actually a very different thing.' He added: 'It's more carnival bakerism than it is discussing what they actually did.' Mr Shubin also said scientists were unable to assess the technological achievements as they do not have access to the methodology behind the work. 'You have a private company that's announcing major scientific results or major technological achievement... without a scientific paper behind it, or any preprint, or any paper trail of methods and anything that anybody can analyse and comment on in any constructive or critical way. So it's all behind closed doors, black box, no publication, and that concerns me as well,' he said. Colossal claimed to have created a 'woolly mouse' last month by editing seven genes in mice embryos to create mice with long, thick, woolly hair. The firm said the achievement vindicated their mission to bring back the woolly mammoth. 'This is another rather over-hyped story from Colossal', said Robin Lovell-Badge, a geneticist at the Francis Crick Institute in London, told The Telegraph. 'Just as their recent one about cute hairy mice, which were a long way from having mammoth physiology, these white wolves are far off being dire wolves. There are many genomic differences between modern day grey wolves and dire wolves and Colossal only made a few genetic alterations to the former. They have white fur and perhaps larger skulls – but this doesn't make them dire wolves, just a product of rather dire thinking.'
BBC News
08-04-2025
- BBC News
Experts dispute Colossal claim dire wolf back from extinction
There is a magnificent, snow-white wolf on the cover of Time Magazine today - accompanied by a headline announcing the return of the dire now extinct species is possibly most famous for its fictional role in Game of Thrones, but it did exist - more than 10,000 years ago - when it roamed across the company Colossal Biosciences is behind today's headlines. It announced that it used "deft genetic engineering and ancient DNA" to breed three dire wolf puppies and to "de-extinct" the while the young wolves - Romulus, Remus, and Khaleesi - represent an impressive technological breakthrough, independent experts say they are not actually dire wolves. Zoologist Philip Seddon from the University of Otago in New Zealand explained: "They are genetically modified grey wolves".Colossal describes itself as "the world's first and only de-extinction company". It has publicised its efforts to use similar cutting edge genetic techniques in its plan to bring back extinct animals including the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian there are significant biological differences between the wolf on the cover of Time and the dire wolf that roamed and hunted during the last ice company has not cloned a dire wolf, explained paleogeneticist Dr Nic Rawlence, also from Otago University. Ancient dire wolf DNA - extracted from fossilised remains - is too degraded and damaged to biologically copy - or clone."Ancient DNA is like if you put fresh DNA in a 500 degree oven overnight," Dr Rawlence told BBC News. "It comes out fragmented - like shards and dust."You can can reconstruct [it], but it's not good enough to do anything else with."Instead, he added "you have to use new synthetic biology technology". That means snipping out pieces of DNA and inserting them into the genetic code of a living animal that has its entire biological blueprint in tact."So what Colossal has produced is a grey wolf, but it has some dire wolf-like characteristics, like a larger skull and white fur," said Dr Rawlence. "It's a hybrid."Dr Beth Shapiro, a biologist from Colossal Biosciences, said that this feat does represent de-extinction, which she described as recreating animals with the same characteristics. "A grey wolf is the closest living relative of a dire wolf - they're genetically really similar - so we targeted DNA sequences that lead to dire wolf traits and then edited grey wolf cells... then we cloned those cells and created our dire wolves." The edited embryos were implanted in surrogate domestic dog mothers, which gave birth to the three now famous which was valued at $10bn (£7.8bn) in January, is keeping the wolves on a private 2,000-acre facility at an undisclosed location in the northern pups certainly look like many people's vision of a dire wolf and the story has gathered global attention. So why is this scientific distinction important?"Because extinction is still forever," Dr Rawlence told BBC News. "If we don't have extinction, how are we going to learn from our mistakes?"Is the message now that we can go and destroy the environment and that animals can go extinct, but we can bring them back?"
