Original photo by pianoman555/ Shutterstock
There is no tree on Earth like the Ginkgo biloba. It’s the sole survivor of its genus, family (Ginkoaceae), order (Ginkgoales), class (Ginkgoopsida), and even its phylum (Ginkgophyta). In other words, it has no living relatives. Ancestors of the ginkgos now filling our parks and city streets lived on Earth 270 million years ago; for those keeping track, that means the ginkgo predates the Triassic Period (aka the beginning of the dinosaurs) by a cool 18 million years. The ginkgo is the oldest living tree species in the world — it’s been nicknamed a “living fossil.”
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It's a factGinkgo trees are hardy — you have to be if you want to live on Earth for 270 million years — and they can even resprout from a stump. In 2013, the National Park Service accidentally cut down a historic ginkgo tree in Washington, D.C., but eight months later it was sprouting leaves.
However, the ginkgo tree’s historic run almost came to an end before it was saved by an unlikely ecological hero: humans. Ginkgos began declining from certain areas of the world, including North America and Europe, as the Earth started to cool 66 million years ago. By the time the last ice age ended and kicked off the Holocene Epoch, the Ginkgo biloba thrived only in what is modern China, where people began planting and eating their seeds. Ginkgos then found their way to Japan and were eventually discovered in the late 17th century by German scientist Engelbert Kaempfer, who reintroduced the tree to the West.
For decades, scientists believed Ginkgo biloba was effectively extinct in the wild, only surviving through human cultivation, but small colonies of wild ginkgo have since been spotted in southwestern China. Today, the ginkgo’s beauty and hardiness make it a natural candidate for city parks and streets, and the tree can be found scattered throughout the U.S. So when you next enjoy the shade of a looming ginkgo, remember that those beautiful leaves once provided refuge for dinosaurs.
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Ginkgos are also known as ______ because their leaves resemble a fern of the same name.
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Ginkgos are also known as maidenhair trees because their leaves resemble a fern of the same name.
Most ginkgo trees planted in the U.S. are male.
While some plants can be both male and female, ginkgo trees are dioecious, meaning they’re either male or female. Male ginkgos release pollen in the spring that fertilizes female trees in the surrounding area — and then the trouble begins. Female seeds are infamous for smelling like vomit (or rancid butter if you’re being polite). Scientists think this smell once attracted some animals, possibly even dinosaurs, to eat the seeds and spread them through digestion, but whatever that animal was, it’s long extinct, and no known animals are attracted to the smell today. Yet the trees are still prized for their tolerance to urban soil and air pollution as well as their beauty, so city planners and tree wardens have avoided the foul smell altogether by often planting only males. That doesn’t mean city streets have avoided the odor entirely, however: Ginkgo trees have been known to spontaneously change sex.
Darren Orf lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes about all things science and climate. You can find his previous work at Popular Mechanics, Inverse, Gizmodo, and Paste, among others.
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