The desert is by no means a hospitable place, especially if you don’t have the ability to seek shelter from the unrelenting heat of the sun. But a single tree managed to survive the arid wasteland for several hundred years. What it couldn’t survive, however, was a careless truck driver who somehow managed to hit the only obstacle in a 800 km (500 mile) stretch of wasteland.

The Tree of Ténéré was an acacia tree (although it actually belonged to the vachellia genus) located in the Ténéré desert in northeastern Niger, and despite its fame for being solitary, it was once part of a much larger grove of trees. In fact, thousands of years ago the area was likely entirely covered in forest. As the climate changed over time and rainfall became more scarce, the number of trees dwindled.

While it isn’t the only tree in the desert, by the time it was recorded for the first time by Westerners, it was surrounded by more than 400 km (250 miles) of nothing but sand in all directions. Virtually all local maps featured the tree, since it was one of the only notable features of the landscape.

...read more at thetreeographer.com