Living Fossils, Rooted in Antiquity

star ledger ^ | KITTA MacPHERSON

[Coleus]

The wind schusses through the grove of tall trees, rustling their soft, bright green needles that, strangely enough, are the color of inchworms. The morning sun spills down through the branches, casting the glade in a pale green light, a hue unlike anything the visitors have ever seen. These metasequoia trees -- all 360 of them -- are living fossils, the lonely representatives of a species that once filled the forests of the Americas, Europe and Asia when dinosaurs roamed the Earth more than 60 million to 100 million years ago. The stand of trees, located on a Rutgers University research farm in East Brunswick, represents one of the world's greatest collections of metasequoia. Only China has more.

Earlier this week, a band of students visited the grove on busy Ryders Lane as part of an experiment they are staging this summer to bring the most modern of tools to bear on this most ancient -- and poorly understood -- species. Rutgers students Sasha Eisenman, Ari Novy and Ramya Raviram are analyzing the DNA of 43 metasequoia in order to come up with distinct "fingerprints" -- a unique genetic sequence -- showing how closely related the trees may be to each other.

"We are trying to understand the genetic diversity of the trees," said Eisenman, a plant biology graduate student leading the experiment. Such knowledge is crucial, he said, if the trees are to be used as a living seed bank. Seed banks are important because they preserve the genetic material of plants, known as the "germplasm," which contain the genes shared by those in a species and those that make each specimen unique.

[Oberon]

As far as living fossils go, my favorite is the ginkgo biloba tree, of which fossils from 270 million years ago have been found, predating dinosaurs, and it shares traits of cycads (that look like ferns or palms) with which the ginkgo is considered among the most primitive seed bearing plants.

...and is downright strange among plants in that it has motile sperm...

[Verginius Rufus]

I haven't really noticed if the birds like the metasequoias. I have a long back yard with lots of trees so I don't have a good view of the metasequoias from the house, and mostly see them when I'm mowing.

Tree preferences among modern species of birds sounds like a good topic for a master's thesis, or maybe for a grant proposal.

[SERE_DOC]

My first thought was this is an article about congress or the senate.

[BenLurkin]

IBTHTP