Icicle Tree - Armstrong Redwoods State Reserve

''Sequoia'' is a

genus Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial nom ...

of redwood coniferous trees in the subfamily Sequoioideae of the family Cupressaceae. The only

extant species Neontology is a part of biology that, in contrast to paleontology, deals with living (or, more generally, ''recent'') organisms. It is the study of extant taxa (singular: extant taxon): taxa (such as species, genera and families) with members sti ...

of the genus is '' Sequoia sempervirens'' in the Northern California coastal forests ecoregion of Northern California and Southwestern Oregon in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

.Kew World Checklist of Selected Plant Families
/ref> The two other genera in the subfamily Sequoioideae, '' Sequoiadendron'' and ''

Metasequoia ''Metasequoia'', or dawn redwoods, is a genus of fast-growing deciduous trees, one of three species of conifers known as redwoods. The living species ''Metasequoia glyptostroboides'' is native to Lichuan county in Hubei province, China. Althou ...

'', are closely related to ''Sequoia''. It includes the tallest trees, as well as the heaviest, in the world. Several

extinct Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...

species In biology, a species is the basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriat ...

have been named from

fossil A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved ...

s, including '' Sequoia affinis ''(Western North America), '' Sequoia chinensis'' (no valid reference, identification uncertain) of

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

, '' Sequoia langsdorfii'' (reclassified as Metasequoia), '' Sequoia dakotensis'' (reclassified as Metasequoia) of

South Dakota South Dakota (; Sioux: , ) is a U.S. state in the North Central region of the United States. It is also part of the Great Plains. South Dakota is named after the Lakota and Dakota Sioux Native American tribes, who comprise a large po ...

(

Maastrichtian The Maastrichtian () is, in the ICS geologic timescale, the latest age (uppermost stage) of the Late Cretaceous Epoch or Upper Cretaceous Series, the Cretaceous Period or System, and of the Mesozoic Era or Erathem. It spanned the inte ...

), and ''

Sequoia magnifica Sequoia, Sequoya or Sequoyah may refer to: Science and technology Biology * Sequoioideae, a three-genus subfamily of the cypress family ** ''Sequoia'' (genus), a genus with one living and several fossil species *** ''Sequoia sempervirens'', coas ...

'' ( petrified wood from the Yellowstone National Park area).

Etymology

The name ''Sequoia'' was first published as a genus name by the Austrian botanist

Stephan Endlicher Stephan Ladislaus Endlicher also known as Endlicher István László (24 June 1804, Bratislava (Pozsony) – 28 March 1849, Vienna) was an Austrian botanist, numismatist and Sinologist. He was a director of the Botanical Garden of Vienna. B ...

in 1847. However, he left no specific reasons for choosing that name, and there is no record of anyone else speaking to him about its origin. The most common modern guess is that Endlicher, a published linguist, sinologist, philologist, as well as a systematic botanist, named the genus in honor of Sequoyah, the inventor of the Cherokee writing system, now known as Sequoyan. Beginning in the 1860s, it was suggested that the name is instead a derivation from the Latin word for "sequence", since the species was thought to be a follower or remnant of massive ancient, extinct species, and thus the next in a sequence. However, in a 2012 article, author Gary Lowe argues that Endlicher would not have had the knowledge to conceive of ''Sequoia sempervirens'' as the successor to a fossil sequence, and that he more likely saw it, within the framework of his taxonomic arrangements, as completing a morphological sequence of species in regards to the number of seeds per cone scale. In 2017, Nancy Muleady-Mecham of Northern Arizona University, after extensive research with original documents in Austria, claimed to find a positive link to the person Sequoyah and Endlicher as well as information that the use of the Latin ''sequor'' would not have been correct, however there are debilitating limitations to the arguments presented in the 2017 article. The alleged positive link is based on a similarity in pronunciation of the words “Sequoyah” and “Sequoia”; valid to persons that think in English, but not those that think in German or Latin. Endlicher could not have known how Sequoyah’s name was pronounced in Cherokee since he never had the opportunity to hear spoken Cherokee. The claimed use of Latin ignores Endlicher’s philological background and familiarity with the Latin of the ancient manuscripts in the royal library on which he extensively published. Endlicher’s Botanical Latin prefix in the genus name Sequoia was derived from the Latin verb “sequor”, and was not a conjugation of the verb.

Paleontology

''Sequoia jeholensis'' is the oldest recorded member of the genus ''Sequoia'' (along with ''Sequoia portlandica'', but this name is a ''

nomen dubium In binomial nomenclature, a ''nomen dubium'' (Latin for "doubtful name", plural ''nomina dubia'') is a scientific name that is of unknown or doubtful application. Zoology In case of a ''nomen dubium'' it may be impossible to determine whether a s ...

''), known from the Jiufotang Formation (Lower Cretaceous) and the

Jiulongshan Formation The Haifanggou Formation (), also known as the Jiulongshan Formation (), is a fossil-bearing rock deposit located near Daohugou () village of Ningcheng County, in Inner Mongolia, northeastern China. The formation consists of coarse conglomerat ...

(Middle Jurassic) of China. By the late

Cretaceous The Cretaceous ( ) is a geological period that lasted from about 145 to 66 million years ago (Mya). It is the third and final period of the Mesozoic Era, as well as the longest. At around 79 million years, it is the longest geological period of ...

the ancestral sequoias were established in

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

, parts of

, and western

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere. It is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South America and th ...

. Comparisons among fossils and modern organisms suggest that by this period ''Sequoia'' ancestors had already evolved a greater tracheid diameter that allowed it to reach the great heights characteristic of the modern '' Sequoia sempervirens'' (coast redwood) and '' Sequoiadendron giganteum'' (giant sequoia). ''Sequoia'' ancestors were not dominant in the tropical high northern latitudes, like ''

'', a redwood whose

deciduous In the fields of horticulture and Botany, the term ''deciduous'' () means "falling off at maturity" and "tending to fall off", in reference to trees and shrubs that seasonally shed leaves, usually in the autumn; to the shedding of petals, ...

habit gave it a significant adaptive advantage in an environment with 3 months of continuous darkness. However, there still was possibly prolonged range overlap between ''Sequoia'' and ''Metasequoia'' which could have led to hybridization events that created the modern

hexaploid Polyploidy is a condition in which the cells of an organism have more than one pair of ( homologous) chromosomes. Most species whose cells have nuclei ( eukaryotes) are diploid, meaning they have two sets of chromosomes, where each set conta ...

''Sequoia sempervirens''. See also the metastudy of the geologic history of the giant sequoia and the coast redwood. A general cooling trend by the late

Eocene The Eocene ( ) Epoch is a geological epoch that lasted from about 56 to 33.9 million years ago (mya). It is the second epoch of the Paleogene Period in the modern Cenozoic Era. The name ''Eocene'' comes from the Ancient Greek (''ēṓs'', ...

and

Oligocene The Oligocene ( ) is a geologic epoch of the Paleogene Period and extends from about 33.9 million to 23 million years before the present ( to ). As with other older geologic periods, the rock beds that define the epoch are well identified but t ...

reduced the northern ranges of ancestral ''Sequoia''. By the end of the

Miocene The Miocene ( ) is the first geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about (Ma). The Miocene was named by Scottish geologist Charles Lyell; the name comes from the Greek words (', "less") and (', "new") and means "less recen ...

and beginning of the

Pliocene The Pliocene ( ; also Pleiocene) is the epoch in the geologic time scale that extends from 5.333 million to 2.58 Continued cooling in the Pliocene meant that ''Sequoia'', which is extremely intolerant to frost due to the high water content of its tissues, also became locally extinct in response to the extreme cooling of Europe and Asia In western North America it continued to move south through coastal

Oregon Oregon () is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. The Columbia River delineates much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of it ...

and

California California is a state in the Western United States, located along the Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the most populous U.S. state and the 3rd largest by area. It is also the m ...

, surviving due to the abundant rainfall and mild seasons. The

Sierra Nevada The Sierra Nevada () is a mountain range in the Western United States, between the Central Valley of California and the Great Basin. The vast majority of the range lies in the state of California, although the Carson Range spur lies primar ...

orogeny Orogeny is a mountain building process. An orogeny is an event that takes place at a convergent plate margin when plate motion compresses the margin. An '' orogenic belt'' or ''orogen'' develops as the compressed plate crumples and is uplifted ...

further isolated ''Sequoia'' because the snowy mountain peaks prevented eastward expansion. The

Pleistocene The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological Epoch (geology), epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was fina ...

and

Holocene The Holocene ( ) is the current geological epoch. It began approximately 11,650 cal years Before Present (), after the Last Glacial Period, which concluded with the Holocene glacial retreat. The Holocene and the preceding Pleistocene togeth ...

distributions are likely nearly identical to the modern ''S. sempervirens'' distributions.

References

{{Authority control Conifer genera Extant Jurassic first appearances Flora of California Flora of Oregon Jurassic plants Pacific temperate rainforests Taxa named by Stephan Endlicher Trees of the Western United States ru:Секвойя