12/6/2023 0 Comments Metasequoia plant![]() Later Hu sent a manuscript to The Bulletin of the Geological Society of China, and to Chaney, reporting on the discovery of the "living fossil" it was published in December 1946. Chaney's first knowledge of the Miki's 1941 paper came through correspondence with H.H. Chaney, a paleobotanist at the University of California, Berkeley, that a living Metasequoia had been found in China. Ma (2002) points out that it is surprising that Hu had received a reprint of Miki's 1941 paper since a war was going on between Japan and China at the time. A few weeks later, he matched the tree specimens with Metasequoia, the fossil genus published by Miki in 1941. Merrill, Director of Harvard's Arnold Arboretum, that a large, deciduous conifer which is likely new genus in the Cupressaceae (cypress family) had been discovered near Moudao. Hu, who had received his PhD from Harvard University in 1925 and considered the founder of modern taxonomy in China, alerted Elmer D. In mid-April 1946 he sent specimens to Hsen-Hen Hu (Xian-Su Hu, 1894-1968), director of the Fan Memorial Institute of Biology in Beijing for his opinion. Cheng concluded that the tree was a new genus and possibly a new family. In February 1946, he sent a graduate student to collect additional material from the strange conifer in Moudao. Cheng visited NBFR to examine other parts of the collected specimen. Wan-Chun Cheng, (Wanjunn Zheng, 1904-1983) a dendrology professor at NCU who immediately realized it was not Glyptostrobus but something new. Two years later, in 1945, Chan Wang gave part of his specimen including two cones to a teaching assistant from the National Central University (NCU) in Chongqing. Chan Wang (Zhang Wang, 1910-2000), chanced upon a deciduous, coniferous trees near a village, Moudao (Mo-tao-chi), in Sichuan Province (now administered by Hubei Province), he collected a specimen which he later identified as Glyptostrobus pensilis (Swamp Cypress), a common deciduous conifer in south China. In 1943, a Chinese forester from the National Bureau of Forest Research (NBFR) in Chongqing (Nanking), Mr. This publication was essentially unknown to Western scientists until after the World War II. The fossils had previously been confused with Taxodium (bald cypress) and Sequoia (redwoods). In 1941 Shigeru Miki (1903-1974), a Japanese paleobotanist, established a new genus, Metasequoia, to accommodate Pliocene fossils from deposits about five million years old. The account of the discovery and subsequent activities has since been updated and corrected by Jinshuang Ma in two publication, Aliso 21(2) :65-75(2002) and Harvard Papers in Botany 8(1):9-18 (2003) The Story of the Discovery and Naming of Dawn RedwoodĪn excellent description of the discovery of Metasequoia glyptostroboides by scientists in the 1940s is in, A Reunion of Trees, by Stephen A.
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