One of the guiding principles of the Millennium Seed Bank Partnerships is that there is no technical reason why a species should go extinct. I don’t know if it’s true, but I know preservation is not always easy. One critically endangered plant is the Saharan Cypress or Tarout (Cupressus dupreziana). However, it’s maybe a little less endangered following the publication of a paper by Jana Lábusová and colleagues reviewing propagation techniques. There isn’t really much information about C. dupreziana, so they use information from other plants with similar life cycles. So the result should help guide conservation of other, similar, plants.

C. dupreziana is found, if you look hard enough, in the Tassili n’Ajjer mountains in the Central Sahara. Scientists have found 8000 year old Cupressaceae pollen grains close to the current populations. “As no other Cupressaceae are recorded in the area, this pollen could likely be attributable to C. dupreziana and therefore the cypress may have thrived here during the African wet phase of the Holocene,” conclude Lábusová and colleagues.