> It's also cheesy that the wiki list gives the size of the park reserve rather than the size of the actual old growth stand.

Probably an overzealous editor. I haven't checked the edit logs for that page in years. Feel free to correct it.

Randomly spot checking (first click), the Cathedral Pines in CT also lists the size of the preserve, even though the resources talk about the forest being damaged by tornadoes. It's more problematic in that a number for the old growth isn't obvious.

> It's not undiscovered.

What does discovery have anything to do with it? The article makes a different claim.

> What we now call “old-growth” forests are simply communities of trees that have been allowed to continue on undisturbed while most of the forest around them has been thinned or cut down entirely. In North America, even places that look thickly forested to us now are often full of relatively young trees, regrown on patches of land that were farms not so long ago.

I was responding to the language in the headline and subtitle and so on. "Without Anyone Noticing", "No one knew", "Secret", etc.