I'm on the road again today, seeking out the mysteries of Life, the Universe and Everything, and I have my towel in hand (literary allusion), but sometimes the best little mysteries come from the home territory. I was out walking on our campus, and realized there seemed to be a problem with this tree that is situated next to the soon-to-be Student Services Building (the construction of which has been very loud; my lab is next door). I took a closer look at the foliage (below).
So the mystery has two parts. What is wrong with the poor tree? And why is that the wrong question to ask?
A short stroll to the other end of the building revealed an extra dimension: how can this tree be related to the one discussed above? And what does any of this have to do with geology?
I'm on the road again today, seeking out the mysteries of Life, the Universe and Everything, and I have my towel in hand (literary allusion), but sometimes the best little mysteries come from the home territory. I was out walking on our campus, and realized there seemed to be a problem with this tree that is situated next to the soon-to-be Student Services Building (the construction of which has been very loud; my lab is next door). I took a closer look at the foliage (below).
So the mystery has two parts. What is wrong with the poor tree? And why is that the wrong question to ask?
A short stroll to the other end of the building revealed an extra dimension: how can this tree be related to the one discussed above? And what does any of this have to do with geology?
8 comments:
Garry, both trees are "living fossils." The first is a redwood, and the second is a ginkgo. The ginkgo genus has been around since the Permian.
The one thing I don't understand (I'm not a botanist) is why the redwood is red!
The redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) is perfectly healthy - it is simply a deciduous conifer.
I was thinking that neither of these trees are growing in their natural environments. Must be the wrong soil, made from rocks, and thus the geology part of the mystery.
We have a couple of dawn redwoods in our yard and there's a gingko next door. My wife has a co-worker who saw the brown leaves on our deciduous redwood and told her that his trees died like that too. They were expensive trees and he said both died in the fall. We explained that dawn redwoods go brown and lose their needles in the fall. He had disposed of two perfectly healthy trees.
Yeah, I'd agree, I think it's just that fall is coming.
Metasequoia is dawn redwood, and unlike Sequoia, it's deciduous- that is, it sheds its needles during the fall. There's one on the OSU campus near the forestry building (Peavy), and it's also one of the most commonly fossilized woods in the Oligocene-Miocene western Cascade volcaniclastic rocks.
How about one last connection between the two... they were both thought to be extinct in the wild until rediscovered in remote parts of China. I think the dawn redwood was rediscovered sometime in the 30's or 40's. On a side note, Turlock High has an amazingly huge ginkgo that has to be pushing 80 or 90 years old. Every December I take my students out to talk about the tree, admire the golden carpet it creates and then make a rubbing using colored pencils - which we then compare to photos of fossilized specimens. It's a neat "ah-ha" moment.
You can see our tree HERE
The first is a Dawn or deciduous redwood, from the heart of Red China, and I know this because we had one on the high school campus I attended, and was told about it by the biology teacher. The second is a ginko biloba (sp?). What they have in common is that they are both "living fossils". How this is related to geology is that they are both found in fossil forms.
What do I win?
Edie
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