Friday, March 5, 2010

History of a tree yucca. Just one.


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;

The remains of U2's famous Joshua tree; Navarre's plaque is just barely visible, far right.

 there is a poignant plaque.
  The Joshua Tree 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"...

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