Fossil tremauts of the Metasequoia were only discovered in 1940 and later assigned a genus. Yet within a year a single living tree was found in China. Recent studies show that these trees once ...

The metasequoia, also known as “a living fossil,” was named 80 years ago by botanist Shigeru Miki (1901-1974), who taught at Kyoto Imperial University, present-day Kyoto University.

Until 1948, the genus Metasequoia was known only from the fossil record, but a small stand of trees discovered in the Sichuan-Hubei region proved to belong to this ancient genus. Thanks to seed ...

Previously thought to be long extinct, our knowledge of the Metasequoia genus was derived from fossil records dating back to the late Mesozoic Era over 100 million years ago. In the winter of 1941, ...