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This endangered California species has survived ice ages, livestock disease and climate change.

And this flexibility is probably what “kept them going when they were dealing with ice ages, all kinds of environmental changes to their feeding grounds over the last several thousand years.”

Some paleontologists think they may have evolved just 2.5 million years ago, at the beginning of the ice ages.

Competition with other plant life and factors like altitude, temperature, precipitation and volcanic activity caused new baobab species to emerge across Madagascar, as did fluctuating sea levels during various ice ages.

The Portuguese Bend area, Coffey notes, is “so old it has been through multiple ice ages.”