dawn redwood

dawn redwood, (Metasequoia glyptostroboides), ancient conifer from central China, the only living species of its genus. The dawn redwood holds an interesting place in the history of paleobotany as one of the few living plants known first as a fossil. Its fossil foliage and cones were originally described under the name Sequoia. In 1941 Japanese botanist Miki Shigeru of Osaka University coined the name Metasequoia for fossil foliage with opposite, rather than spirally arranged, leaves. The first living Metasequoia trees were discovered in 1944 by Chinese botanist Wang Zhan in Sichuan province, China. The plant is a common ornamental tree that grows well in temperate climates worldwide. In the wild the tree is threatened by habitat loss and is listed as an endangered species by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

Fossil representatives of the genus Metasequoia—such as M. occidentalis, dated to about 90 million years ago during the Late Cretaceous Period—are known throughout the middle and high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. Climatic cooling and drying that began about 65.5 million years ago and continued throughout the Cenozoic Era caused the geographic range of the dawn redwood to contract to its present relic distribution. The leaves are arranged in pairs on deciduous branchlets, and this deciduous character probably accounts for the tree’s abundance in the fossil record. Metasequoia is closely related to the redwood genera of North America, Sequoia and Sequoiadendron.