The Chir Pine of the Geoscience Building

A Himalayan pine is the largest of its species in Nevada, and it happens to stand outside the geoscience building. Pinus roxburghii grows on the dry outer foothills of the Himalaya, from Pakistan across to Bhutan, in country that takes a monsoon and then goes months with nothing. That is exactly the trick required in southern Nevada, which is why it is planted across the Southwest and why this one reaches 52 feet in the Mojave. The Nevada Big Tree Register recorded it in 2015 at 48 inches around, 52 feet tall and 25 feet across, at the Lilly Fong Geoscience Building on the UNLV campus. The university named the same tree at the same height in November 2025, which is the evidence that it is still standing. The needles give it away. They come in threes, hang in loose tassels and can reach a foot long, so the whole tree looks softer and shaggier than the short-needled pines used in landscaping around it. Stand under it in a wind and it sounds different too. Neither source gives a planting date, so no age is claimed here. Nobody in the state has a bigger one on record, which is a different kind of distinction and the only one we can back. The pin is the building rather than the trunk; the tree is the obvious one out front.