Steve Hopper

And that got me into eucalypts and, you know, the rest is history.

around about 850 to 900 at this stage.

Most of them are named in the old way, going right back to the 1800s, which was by botanists eyeballing herbarium specimens, you know, dried specimens, and not much else.

So as we apply Darwinian approaches, and also today we have this wonderful tool called DNA sequencing,

we're now in a position to really nail how many species we've got.

And I speculate that in eucalypts, there's probably at least another hundred species to be named.

So we'll be pushing towards a thousand species.

My most recent contribution was just a couple of years ago and it was a new subspecies of a species that I'd named with a colleague, Nathan McCoy.

We called it Swedenmaniana after the seed collector at Kings Park, Luke Swedenman.

When we discovered that species, it was on one granite rock, Mount Arad, east of Esperance.

And people had also been turning up similar looking things but different on inland granite rocks adjacent to the ocean and beyond.

It turned out these little short mallies they were, one to two metres high, but upright stemmed and not sprawling like Sweet Maniana's original population was.

Turned out they were unnamed and they have brilliant big red flowers, so stunning for horticulture.

And I ended up naming that Eucalyptus swedemaniana subspecies Noongaring.

So Noongaring is for the Noongar people who are the Aboriginal occupants of the country in which it occurs and that's the name now used more generally for anyone from the southern and western part of Western Australia.

It's almost unique globally and it's one of the great unexplained aspects of evolutionary biology because the ancestors of the eclipse arose 60 million years ago, but the vast majority of species have evolved in the last two, three million years.

So you've had this tremendous explosion of hundreds of species very recently.

It was a time when Australia was still drying up and becoming drier and drier as it drifted away from Antarctica, drifted northwards.

The climate got drier and drier and that placed selection pressure on things like eucalypts that can tolerate drought.

They're often deep-rooted or they have roots that are expert at finding their way through the soil and finding little pockets of water.