Section 02 of 05
Plants
Three quarters of them grow nowhere else.
Four entries. Every entry is one thing that exists only here, and the reason it does.
- 02.1
Amborella
A modest shrub found only here that sits at the base of the entire flowering-plant family tree — the sister lineage to every other flower on earth.
02.2Cook pines
Araucaria columnaris, the columnar trees James Cook recorded in 1774, and the lean that tracks latitude.
02.3The maquis minier
The low, hard scrub that grows on metal-rich ground, and why its species are so often confined to one massif.
02.4Gondwanan relicts
Lineages that survived here after dying out elsewhere, and how the claim is tested.