Its cones are round and about 1 inch long. Unfortunately, Wang’s contribution was not mentioned in the original paper, and the exact account of the discovery became convoluted.ĭawn redwood ( Metasequoia glytostroboides) is a deciduous, medium to large tree. The discovery ignited the botanical community as well as the general public, and soon seeds of what became commonly known as dawn redwood were being disseminated across the globe. In 1948, Hu and Zheng published a paper describing the species and giving it the official name, Metasequoia glyptostroboides. Hu had access to Miki’s research and concluded that what they had was a living fossil.
These samples were more complete, and when they were presented to Xiansu Hu – the director of Fan Memorial Institute of Biology in Beijing – the mystery was solved. Intrigued, Zheng sent his graduate student, Jiru Xue, to collect more samples from the same tree that Wang had encountered. At the time he identified it as Glyptostrobus pensilis (water pine), a tree common to the area but he may have wondered if this was correct.Įventually Wang’s samples and the details of his collection were brought to the attention of Wanjun Zheng, a dendrologist at the National Central University. Wang collected several branches and some cones that had fallen on a rooftop. They called it shuisa (water fir) and had built a shrine around it. The tree was obviously important to the local people. As Rubin points out, due to the war, “not every Chinese botanist would have had access to recent international research, let alone articles by botanists of an enemy country.” This could explain why in 1943 when Zhan Wang – a professer of forestry at Beijing University and the forest administrator for the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry – was introduced to a living Metasequoia by an old classmate and local villagers in the Hubei Province, he wasn’t sure what he was looking at. In 1941, Japanese paleobotanist, Shigeru Miki, published research describing fossils that for decades were thought to be either Sequoia or Taxodium as a new genus, Metasequoia. A broad cast of characters interacted at various levels in order to make this profound discovery during a tumultuous time when the world was at war and China was being invaded by Japan. It’s the type of story that you almost need a crazy wall to sort out. In the January 2016 issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine, Kyna Rubin details the event in an article entitled The Metasequoia Mystery. The circumstances surrounding its scientific description, as it turns out, are equally interesting. Its discovery is easily one of the greatest botanical stories of the 20th century, fascinating in its own right. Thousands of fossils were left behind, and that would have been the end of the story had a member of its genus not been discovered still alive in a Chinese province later that decade.
However, sometime during the Pliocene, the genus was thought to have died out.
It had, in its day, been a widespread genus, found commonly in many areas across the Northern Hemisphere. In the early 1940’s, the genus Metasequoia was only known scientifically in fossil form.