“And there were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery”   Kubla Kahn, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

What are “living fossils”? 
The term, initially coined by Charles Darwin (example: the Platypus), means living organisms which are in the fossil records.

What are “Lazarus trees”?
Trees which were believed to be extinct and later living trees are discovered, eg. Metasequoia.

A better term for trees of this nature is prehistoric trees - living trees (at the the genus level) which have a fossil record.  Many gymnosperm genera are found in the Pliocene (ended 1.8 million years ago) strata and then were lost in the Pleistocene (1.8 million tyo 12000 years ago) glaciation, but managed to survive in smaller areas ( a “relictual” population) today.  Examples:  Araucaria, Cycads, Ginkgos, Cryptomeria, Keteleeria, Pseudolarix, Sciadopytis, Sequoia, Taiwania, Welwitschia and Wollemia.

Here are two fascinating stories about living “fossil trees”. 

(1) Metasequoia glyptostroboides (Dawn Rewood):

Dr. Shigeru Miki

botany at Osaka City University in 1941.  There were well known fossil redwoods from 2 to 60 million years ago, found widely throughout the northern hemisphere from as far north as Spitsbergen, Greenland and arctic islands of Canada and extending south into Alaska, Western Canada and the U.S. and also present in Europe, Russia, Japan and eastern China.  It was believed that all of these were the same tree as the California Coastal Redwood, Sequoia sempervirens.

Dr. Miki noted that his material had an opposite arrangement of needles and cone scales, whereas Sequoia sempervirens had alternate needles and a spiral arrangement of cone scales.  Also, Dr. Miki’s material had cones attached to the end of naked shoots instead of leaf-bearing shoots.  This suggested a deciduous habit.  He proposed the genus name Metasequoia (after opposite and sequoia).  It is now known that the far northern, Asian, North American, eastern China, Japan and some of the U.S. fossils are Metasequoia, although true Sequoia fossils from this time are present in Europe and the U.S. (mixed).

In 1944, Tsang Wang, a forester with the central bureau of forest research in China, found a large tree on temple grounds near the village of Mo-Tao-Chi in Sichuan Province (central China).  This tree was unknown to him, so he took a specimen to Dr. W.C. Cheng, professor at National Central University in Nanjing, who was also puzzled.  So the samples ended up in the hands of Dr. H. H. Hu, director of the Fan Memorial Institute in Beijing, who named this tree Metasequoia glyptostroboides (after an extant Chinese water cypress).  Dr. E.D. Merrill, former director of the Arnold Institute in Boston confirmed that the “temple tree” at Mo-Tao-Chi was indeed the “living fossil” of the tree described 3 years earlier by Dr. Miki.  Seeds were sent to and initially distributed by the Arnold Arboretum in January 1948.

In the winter of 1948 Dr. Ralph W. Chaney, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, and Milton Silverman, science editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, traveled to central China and found a grove of Dawn Redwood near Chongqing.  The largest of the indigenous Dawn Redwood trees reach 115 feet tall and up to 7 feet chest-height diameter.

Ultimately it was found that the present day natural distribution of the Dawn Redwood was confined to a small area of Sichuan, Hubei and Hunnan Provinces.  But, in keeping with its ancient wide distribution, this tree has proved to be widely adaptable (zones 4-10) and a rapid grower.  It is now thriving in a many locations throughout the world and it is estimated that this tree will reach 150 feet in ideal locations.  The only problem is poor seed production, apparently related to narrow gene diversity (inbreeding depression from self fertilization).  Almost all of the Metasequoia growing in the U.S. today originated from seed, received in January 1948 by Dr. Merrill, from one or a few trees.

In 1993,  Metasequoia seeds from several sites (52 trees) were received by Dr. John Kuser at Rutgers University.  He germinated them and sent 344 trees to the Dawes Arboretum where they have been planted in an 8 acre area.  Will greater genetic diversity result in greater fertility?  Time will tell.

Metasequoia glyptostroboides (winter) 24 years old; 60 feet tall, has formed a new leader

(2) Wollemia nobilis (”Wollemi Pine”):

Wollemia nobilis

In August 1994, a young park ranger named David Noble was hiking in the Wollemi National Park in the Blue Mountains, about 150 km. northeast of Sydney, Australia. He was in search of slot canyons and had entered a gorge surrounded by high sandstone cliffs. As he looked down into a shallow creek, he saw an unfamiliar branch and looked up and saw he was in a grove (39 trees) of odd-looking, tall (30 meter or so) trees. He took a specimen back home with him and, still unable to identify it, he showed it to Wyn Jones, Senior Naturalist with the NSW National parks and Wildlife Service. Wyn and botanist Jan Allen searched diligently for the identity of this tree, finally concluding that it a new species, in the Araucaceae family.  Wollemia is now the third genus (in addition toAraucaria andAgathis) in this family.

Multiple research and propagation efforts are now underway at The Royal Botanic Gardens in Sydney and The Mount Annan Botanic Garden in Narellan. The tree has now been propagated from seeds, cuttings and tissue culture.  Tissue culture which uses a small amount of material in producing many new trees, offers the promise of relatively rapid availability of these trees (each will be an exact clone of the parent) through out the world and is now commercially available.  Commercial availability will probably reduce poaching pressure at the initial discovery site. It is now known that there are two groves of the Wollemi Pine about 1.5 km. apart and, although the exact site location has been kept secret, unauthorized visits have already occurred.

Wollemia nobilis has a very primitive appearance and Jurassic (140 million years before present) fossils from Talbragar in New South Wales have very similar foliage. Similar fossil pollen from Victoria is known to have occurred up to 90 million years ago. The oldest individual trees in the gorge are estimated to be about 400 years in age and they have strong coppicing tendency, so as many as 30 trunks may arise from roots that are much older. There are also many epicormic shoots. The adult trees vary from 88 to 115 feet high and one fallen trunk measured 124 feet long and 10 feet circumference. The bark has an usual brown knobby cork-like (”bubbly chocolate”) character. The leaves are light green with waxy surfaces and arranged in two rows. The female cones grow at the end of the upper branches, separate from the males cones on lower branches.

Any of the search engines will reveal many illustrative sites if you seek the word “Wollemia.”

Even the name of this “fossil tree” has a great appeal:  nobilis for David Noble and because only a very noble tree could have survived for so many millions of years and the aboriginal word Wollemia means “look around you”.

Wollemiawas first made commercially availabe in the fall of 2006 by The National Geographic Society at a cost of $99.95