Who's as hungry as this diplodocus? I'm not sureif they'd have eaten monkey tail trees, but this week I learned that they existed alongside each other, so that's my excuse.

Excerpt from this story from The Revelator:

A few weeks ago, after construction detours in Portland, Oregon sent me down a seemingly endless series of wrong turns, I stumbled across something I never thought I’d see in person: a monkey puzzle tree.

These bizarre, prehistoric-looking pine trees — Araucaria Araucana, also known as the pewen, piñonero, or monkey tail tree — have fascinated me ever since I first wrote about them in 2016. They’re massive trees, with sharp, scaly leaves that grow in a spiral pattern that looks more like an assemblage of succulent “hens and chicks” plants than your typical conifer.

Monkey puzzle trees are, surprisingly, fairly common in the Portland area, although they’ve eluded my sight until now. It turns out they’ve been here for 120 years, ever since the Chilean delegation to the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition gave seedlings to many attendees. Today the Portland government tracks a few of the city’s biggest monkey puzzle trees, a Google map tells you where to find the rest, and Oregon State University lists them as one of the region’s notable ornamental plants. There’s even a monkey puzzle tree farm about 100 miles south.

But to really understand monkey puzzle trees, you need to travel much further south — to their native South America.

Climate change, drought and fires have all taken a toll on the trees. On top of that, a rapidly spreading fungus called Pewenomyces kutranfy (named after the trees) turned up around 2015, causing wound-like cankers that ooze sap, killing approximately 2% of infected trees. We don’t yet know if this fungus came from somewhere else or if changing conditions allowed it to grow out of control.

Clearly a cultivated specimen, but that profile is unmistakable.

First described as Pinus araucana by Jesuit priest, linguist, and naturalist (and early evolutionary theorist) Juan Ignacio Molina in 1782. In 1797, Spanish botanist José Antonio Pavón Jiménez named it Araucaria imbricata - illegitimate, as it didn't use Molina's older araucana. Eventually, in 1873, after several further redescriptions, German botanist Karl Koch published the combination Araucaria araucana, which seems to have stuck. The binomial is derived from the local Araucanians who collected the nuts.

A living fossil from the Central-southern slopes of the Andes, and like the Sequoia an endangered species. Logging, forest fires, and grazing are the biggest threats.

Trees can be over 40m in height, and live for over 1300 years. The triangular, scale-like leaves themselves have an average age of 24 years.

In its home range the long-haired grass mouse Abrothrix longipilis is the main seed disperser, burying seeds whole in locations favorable for germination.

The oldest fossil records of Araucariaceae are from the Early Jurassic, if not earlier. Early representatives of Araucaria were widespread across both hemispheres by the Middle Jurassic.

A popular ornamental conifer everywhere the climate suits it and it has room to grow - Cornwall has a excellent genetic diversity of the plant thanks to the number of seedlings and seeds sent home by miners after the Cornish diaspora.

Araucaria araucana (monkey puzzle tree)

The monkey puzzle tree evolved in the early Jurassic and it’s sharp pointed leaves, no doubt, dissuaded dinosaurs from eating them. Monkey puzzles have girl cones (photo 1) and boy cones (photo 2) on separate trees. The female cones mature in autumn, about 18 months after pollination, and contain about 200 seeds. They don’t start producing seeds until the tree is 40 years old. This tree is native to Argentina and Chile but because of logging, cattle grazing and climate change it is now on the Endangered Species List in its home range.