Discovery of extant material of the “Living Fossil”, Metasequoia glyptostroboides (dawn redwood, Chinese redwood, water fir), in China in the 1940s was one of the greatest botanical discoveries of the twentieth century.
Source: http://www.metasequoia.org/first.pdf (Accessed May 17, 2008)
Leaves of Metasequoia glyptostroboides Source: Wikipedia: Metasequoia (Accessed on May 17, 2008)
The genus Metasequoia is generally placed in the family Cupressaceae (Cypress Family), although in the past it and several other genera, including the Redwoods (Sequoia and Sequoiadendron) and Baldcypresses (Taxodium), were grouped into a smaller family, the Taxodiaceae.
The attached placemark identifies the area where Metasequoia glyptostroboides is indigenous.
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A total of 5396 native Metasequoia trees exist either as scattered (isolated) individual trees or in populations from two regions of this area. The majority of trees (5391 trees) grow in the first region, which includes eastern Chongqing and western Hubei. Only five trees exist in the second region at western Hunan.
Source: http://www.peabody.yale.edu/scipubs/abstracts/abs_b48-2.html (Accessed May 17, 2008)
This tree is now widely planted as an ornamental in many parts of the world. At first its genus was known only as a fossil.
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The genus was "described in 1941 by the Japanese palaeobotanist, S. Miki, in a paper on the change of flora in eastern Asia since the Tertiary Period. Miki based his new genus on fossil material found in Lower Pliocene deposits in the clay beds of Central Honshu. He realized that two species formerly assigned to Sequoia were distinct from that genus, having similar cones but with decussately arranged scales and a delicate peduncle with scale leaves at the base, whilst the deciduous foliage shoots were somewhat like those of Taxodium. It became evident that the two Japanese species, Metasequoia disticha and M. japonica, were related to other species in widely separated areas, e.g. M. chinensis, from Manchuria and Sakhalin, and M. heerii in North America. Miki's work excited little interest except amongst palaeobotanists but, when a living species of this fossil genus was discovered in Central China in 1945, it became of world wide importance to botanists, arboriculturists, and foresters.
Source: http://www.conifers.org/cu/me/index.htm (Accessed May 17, 2008)
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