: Seeing the trees' perfectly straight trunks—often reaching over 60 meters (200 feet)—Cook and his botanist, Joseph Banks, believed they had found a perfect source for ship masts and yards for the British Royal Navy.
Long before it was discovered by humans, the Araucaria family flourished across the globe. Fossil records from roughly show these trees lived alongside dinosaurs like the Argentinosaurus . Their distinctive, tough, upward-curving needles may have even evolved as armor to protect them from hungry prehistoric herbivores. While they eventually went extinct in the Northern Hemisphere, they survived in the South Pacific as "living fossils". 2. Discovery and "The Great Mistake" araucaria excelsa
The European "chapter" of its story began in , when Captain James Cook sighted Norfolk Island during his second voyage on the HMS Resolution . Discovery and "The Great Mistake" The European "chapter"