History of a tree yucca. Just one.

via Chris Clarke:

In 1926, a guy named Burton Frasher photographed a desert landscape in a place called Centennial Flat, not far from Darwin, CA.

He sold it as a postcard:

 

Chris Clarke recognized that Joshua Tree (Yucca brevifolia) in the middle:

 What's so cool is, he recognized it from a somewhat more famous photo taken 60 years later:

And the third pic in this sequence dates from 2009;



 there is a poignant plaque.
 

How cool is that to have a visual record of a single famous organism over 80+ years?


Dead JTs like this are the preferred habitat of the desert night lizard (Xantusia vigilis), a very cool lizard for several reasons, including its ridiculously low metabolic rate:

Imagine here U2 covering "The Circle of Life"...