MOUNT READ HUON PINE COLONY 10,500 years old
West Tasmania, Australia
The ancestry of the Huon pine plant family, Podocarpaceae, can be T traced back to 200 million years ago through fossilised plant pollen records. But despite being called a pine, the Huon pine is actually another type of coniferous tree with scale-like leaves called a Podocarpus tree. In Tasmania, there’s one clonal population of this tree that covers an area of 10,000 square metres. Even though it’s a large population of individual trees, each one stemmed from a single male Huon pine tree that grew over 10,500 years ago. This makes the population the world’s oldest colony of genetically identical trees.
Today, each of these trees is an exact replica of the original, which shed its branches and multiplied in number. After uncovering that each of the Mount Read Huon pine trees were identical in the 1990s, scientists developed a
