įinally, Hu compared the material to fossil Metasequoia specimens and realized they were the same. However, he was uncertain of this designation so sent the material to Hu Hseng Hu of Fan Memorial Institute in Peking, who introduced yet another name, Pingia grandis. Cheng studied the material and attributed them to a different taxon, which he named Chieniodendron sinense. Wang provisionally identified the tree as a known species of Glyptostrobus three years later he shared the specimens with Wan-Chun Cheng of the National Central University in Nanking for further study.
Not satisfied to leave without the cones, his crew went to the roof of a building underneath the tree and collected many cones that had dropped there from the tree. Wang collected several branches and hoped to also gather cones, but these were too high in the tree. Wang and his crew changed their travel plans and went to Modaoxi to see the tree, arriving July 20, 1943. Metasequoia living fossil – image by deelish.ieĪ couple years later, Zhan Wang of the National Bureau of Forest Research in China was leading an expedition to collect modern plants in south-central China when he learned of an unusual large tree growing in Modaoxi. Many of the fossils previously described as Taxodium and Sequoia were thus attributed to this new genus.
In 1941, Japanese paleobotanist Shigeru Miki was studying samples of Taxodium and the related redwood Sequoia when he realized that many of the specimens had enough unique characteristics to qualify as a new genus, which he named Metasequoia. Abundant fossil were recovered in Oregon in deposits as young as 5 million years old. Geologist John Strong Newberry – image by Īs the years passed, other collectors found countless samples of this taxon, from Alaska, Canada and the northern United States. He concluded the specimens all belonged to a previously unknown species of cypress-like conifer that he named Taxodium occidentale.
Years later, in 1863, geologist John Strong Newberry compared this picture to fossils collected along the Washington coast by geologist George Gibbs as part of the U.S. In his scientific description of the expedition, Geologist James Dwight Dana figured a fossil plant that had been collected in or near the area encompassed by modern-day Washington state. In the middle 19th century the United States Congress authorized an exploring and surveying expedition to the Pacific Ocean that ended up running from 1838 to 1842. The conifer Metasequoia, which lived in Oregon as late as 5 million years ago, was declared the state’s fossil in 2005.
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