Cobar Wollemi was name chosen for the new koala at the San Francisco Zoo. (Photo courtesy of the San Francisco Zoo & Gardens)

A new koala at the San Francisco Zoo & Gardens has a name following a naming contest to raise money for Australian bushfire relief, zoo officials said.

The chosen name is Cobar Wollemi (pronounced Coe-bar Wall-em-eye). Cobar means “burnt earth” in an aboriginal language while Wollemi is the name of pine trees, once thought to be extinct, and saved heroically from the bushfires.

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Keith Burbank is currently a fulltime reporter covering Alameda County and Oakland news for Bay City News. He has also worked on the Data Points project for Local News Matters, finding trends and stories about the region through data. In 2019, he was a California Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, producing a series about homeless deaths in Santa Clara County. He worked as a swing shift editor for the newswire for several years as well. Outside of journalism, Keith enjoys computer programming, math, economics and music.