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.

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. In fact the genus Metasequoia was described first as a fossil by a Japanese paleobotanist Shigeru Miki in 1939 but just a few years later several Chinese. 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. Known only from fossil records until 1941, this tree was first discovered growing in. genus metasequoia: genus of deciduous conifers comprising both living and fossil forms 1 extant species: dawn redwood of China variously classified as. 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. (or dawn redwood) is the only species within the genus Metasequoia. 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. Dawn redwood, (Metasequoia glyptostroboides), ancient conifer from central China, the only living species of its genus. Cheng proposed a new family, Metasequoiaceae, for the genus Metasequoia. Then, a forester, Zhan Wang took samples from a mysterious stand of trees deep in a valley in the Hubei Province of central China. Species of the Genus Metasequoia Found in Szechuan and Hupeh/7 H. The genus Metasequoia was first described from fossil material. Rocks containing the imprints of the dawn redwood’s characteristic needle pattern had been found in North America, Europe, and East Asia. The dawn redwood is a deciduous conifer, just like the larch. 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. Abstract: The plant fossil record provides evidence that the genus Metasequoia was widely distributed and experienced a wide range of climatic and environmental conditions throughout the Northern Hemisphere from the early Late Cretaceous to the Plio-Pleistocene.

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.

Genus metasequoia fossil