Until 1941, botanists knew the dawn redwood only from fossils, certain a conifer that shed its needles every winter had gone extinct millions of years earlier.
Dawn Redwood
Metasequoia glyptostroboides
Every dawn redwood on this page descends from one valley in central China. We map 17 of them, in 16 cities.
The species was known only from imprints in stone and filed under extinct until living trees were found there in the 1940s, and seed collected in 1947 and 1948 went out by post to botanical gardens around the world, which is where these came from. The rediscovery gets dated to 1941 and to 1944 depending on which step is being counted, and both dates turn up in the records behind these trees. They are young, most between sixty and eighty years old, and worth the walk anyway, because a conifer that turns rust orange and drops its needles every winter is an odd thing to meet. Portland's coned in 1952, the first any dawn redwood had done in the Western Hemisphere since the species vanished from it.
Dublin
Berlin
Autumn colour
Botanists knew this tree as a fossil before anyone knew it was still alive.
Montreal
The dawn redwood was known only from fossils until 1941, when foresters in western China found a living grove that nobody in the West believed still existed.
Krakow
Autumn colour
This species was described from fossils before anybody found a living one.
Boston
Autumn colour
This tree grew from the seed shipment that put a fossil back into the ground.
Autumn colour
Until 1944 this species was known only from fossils and assumed to have been extinct for millions of years.
Edinburgh
Until 1944, the dawn redwood was known only as a fossil, a conifer botanists assumed had died out millions of years ago.
Hobart
Until 1941 this species was known only from fossils.
Delft
Autumn colour
Every dawn redwood alive today, anywhere in the world, descends from a single discovery: a species known only from 150-million-year-old fossils, presumed extinct, until a forester found a living st...
Baarn
Autumn colour
Until 1941 this species existed only as a fossil.
Bad Homburg
This species was known only from fossils until 1944.
Belfast
Autumn colour
Until 1946 this species existed only as a fossil.
Frankfurt
Autumn colour
Until 1943 this species was known only from fossils.
Ottawa
Autumn colour
Botanists had a name for this species before anyone had seen one alive.
Portland
Autumn colour
Until 1944 the dawn redwood was a fossil.
Spokane
Autumn colour
Botanists knew this tree from fossils before they knew it was alive.
Wilmington, Delaware
Autumn colour
This tree grew a trunk 556 centimetres round in under eighty years.
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