It's not fragile at all, it's huge, it's beyond measure. Just our human petty egos are fragile. Life doesn't give a shit, it persists!
This exactly! But I have gotten in trouble previously for daring to suggest such a thing :)
Were the trees around it different? As I think some trees are like mushrooms (you see a bunch of individual trees topside, underside they're actually the same insanely huge thing, perhaps root system in this case) so maybe the other trees were dead and this one was part of a supercolony XD
I have to look closer when I'm there again. The trees around didn't look different. It's actually all a wood plantation, it's not a wild forest.