Genus metasequoia12/22/2023 ![]() They are now popular ornamental plants around the world. Soon after the war, scientists have collected the seeds and, through university reproduction programs, brought them into modernity. ![]() During the Second World War, the Dawn redwood was rediscovered in the Szechuan province in China. Today, the fossilized redwoods are still visible there in the layers of rocks and coal, given away by the characteristic grains and knots of tree tissues.Īs the Earth’s climate cooled, the entire genus went extinct – or at least we thought so. Graph: NPS, public domain.ĭue to the then-primarily tropical climate, the Metasequoia range stretched as far as Northern Canada and Alaska. Height comparison between the Dawn Redwood, Giant Sequoia, and the Coast Redwood. For about 35 million years, they had been dominant in forests throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The genus Metasequoia consisted of tall, fast-growing, deciduous conifers that used to be common from late Cretaceous to Miocene. In fact, it is one of the rare tree species that is considered a living fossil. The Arboretum distributed over a kilogram of the tiny, lentil-sized seeds to arboreta and botanic gardens across the world, playing a crucial role in the tree’s international reinstatement and conservation.Ĭlick here to read a transcript of the audio segment below.Dawn redwood ( Metasequoia glyptostroboides), is a “cousin” of the better-known Giant sequoia and the Coast sequoia – and a really ancient cousin too. The dawn redwoods planted at the Arboretum-including the one before you-are the first of their kind to grow in North America in over two million years. Elmer Merrill, director of the Arboretum from 1935 to 1946, funded a collecting trip in China to bring back seed. Researchers and scientists rushed to see the trees for themselves. The discovery of a “living fossil” made international headlines. It was alive and well and living in western Hubei Province. In 1946, Hu and another professor announced the discovery that Metasequoia had not gone extinct after all. One of these colleagues was Hsen Hsu Hu, a prominent professor who was the first person from China to receive a doctorate in botany from Harvard University. ![]() Over the next several years, Wang worked with colleagues to coordinate collecting expeditions and taxonomic Taxonomy: A branch of science concerned with systems of classifying living and non-living things. At the foot of the oldest tree were a collection of votives-community members had been leaving offerings under the branches for decades. Then, a forester, Zhan Wang took samples from a mysterious stand of trees deep in a valley in the Hubei Province of central China. Rocks containing the imprints of the dawn redwood’s characteristic needle pattern had been found in North America, Europe, and East Asia. In the early 1940s, the genus Metasequoia was known only from the fossil record Fossil record: The totality of all preserved remains of once-living things throughout geological history. The tree symbolizes the Arboretum’s missions of international conservation, education, and research. In 1998, the Arboretum’s magazine, Arnoldia, named the dawn redwood the “tree of the century.” You may recognize the tree from the Arboretum’s logo, where it has been featured since 1995.
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