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| Ball's Pyramid, home to giant insects, is in New South Wales |
Ball's Pyramid is an incredible piece of New South Wales geology that many Australians have never heard of.
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| Ball’s Pyramid is about 23km east of Lord Howe Island. |
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| More than a kilometer long and200m wide, Ball's Pyramid is 0.5% in size of the once mammoth volcano that stood here 7 million years ago |
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| Another view showing how vast it is. |
In 1964, climber David Roots photographed a dead "stick insect" on the Pyramid. Roots was part of a group led by Dick Smith who were attempting to become the first to climb the island.
Dick Smith’s group didn’t quite make it to the top after being forced to turn around because of bad weather, but a year later a number of climbers from Sydney University successfully made it all the way.
Determined to reach the summit, Smith returned in 1980 and made it to the top where he erected a flag given to him by then premier Neville Wran.
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| The ‘tree lobster’ insect, which is as large as a human hand, had somehow survived despite the lack of food and the harsh conditions |
It was determined that the creature was an extinct plasmid that had been driven from Lord Howe Island by a rat infestation in the 1930's.
Smith’s love of Ball's Pyramid saw him gladly pay for the construction of a detailed scale model of the island in 2017 which marked the 50th anniversary of that first attempted climb.
Almost 40 years later, a group from the National Parks and Wildlife Service made the startling discovery that the insects were still living on Ball's Pyramid. Most of them were collected and taken to Melbourne Zoo in 2001 to become part of a breeding program.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2108736/Extinct-tree-lobster-alive-clinging-Pacific-rock-taller-Empire-State-Building.html
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