Firefighters have saved the world’s last remaining wild stand of a prehistoric tree from Australia’s wildfires. The national parks director says firefighters winched from helicopters to reach the cluster of fewer than 200 Wollemi Pines in a remote gorge in the Blue Mountains a week before a massive wildlife bore down. A state environmental official says the stand was saved, though some plants were singed. The Wollemi Pine had only been seen in its fossilized form and was thought long extinct before the stand west of Sydney was found in 1994.
