“Elements of what you lose … are irreplaceable,” he said. “If we’ve lost some of its genetic diversity, in evolutionary terms that’s lost forever.”

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While the Nightcap grove is ancient, the scientific community was unaware of its existence until a few decades ago. In 1988, Kooyman was walking along a creek in a remote part of Nightcap National Park when he discovered a juvenile tree with elliptical, sawtooth-edged leaves he couldn’t identify. The tree seemed to have some affinity to Proteaceae, an early family of flowering plants with a lineage going back more than 120 million years. But its identity would remain a mystery until Kooyman returned to the same patch of forest 12 years later and came upon specimens of the same type of tree in different stages of growth: a seedling, a sapling, and an adult tree with fleshy golden fruits underneath it. When he returned a few months after that, he discovered its tubular, cream-colored flowers.

With the entire life cycle of the plant now evident, Kooyman and fellow botanist Peter Weston of the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney soon confirmed that the tree was, in fact, a member of Proteaceae. They set about formally describing the species, and in 2002, they gave it a name: Eidothea hardeniana.

Eidothea was a goddess from Homer’s The Odyssey, a daughter of Proteus, with extraordinary powers. Hardeniana, meanwhile, paid homage to Gwen Harden, a prolific botanist at the Royal Botanic Garden who was on the brink of retirement.

“We regarded Gwen as something of our goddess of the rain forest, but she’d never had a species named for her,” Kooyman said. “To support women in science and acknowledge her incredible contributions, we named our newly discovered goddess for Gwen.”

The mythological epithet is appropriate in more ways than one. Based on DNA evidence, researchers have estimated that the Eidothea genus evolved more than 70 million years ago, deep in the history of flowering plants. At that time, Antarctica, Australia, and South America’s Patagonia region were stitched together into an evolved form of Gondwana blanketed in temperate rain forest. Many of the plant lineages found growing in the Nightcap area today, including araucaria and eucalyptus trees and evergreen tree ferns, are present in Gondwanan fossil beds from Argentina to Antarctica, suggesting Eidothea is part of a primitive botanical community that spanned the supercontinent.

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“It represents an ancient lineage from an ancient family,” Peter Wilf, a paleobotanist at Penn State University who studies remnant Gondwanan forests, told me. “It also represents an ancient type of forest.” In fact, ecological surveys suggest that in addition to sheltering dozens of threatened endemic animals, the Nightcap area is more “Gondwanan,” floristically speaking, than any other place in Australia.