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The key to our understanding of the ancient forests of the northern hemisphere might be found not only in the living Coast Redwood ( Sequoia sempervirens) of California but in the groves of Dawn Redwoods ( Metasequoia glyptostroboides) in Szechuan. If that were the case, perhaps other fossil redwoods I had found in many other parts of the world were likewise related to the newly discovered trees of central China. The idea was gradually developing in my mind that it was fossils not of Sequoia but of Metasequoia that I had collected in Manchuria in 1925, at the end of a season with the Central Asiatic Expedition in Mongolia. We collected some of these cones for later study in America, but our immediate interest was in the environment of these close relatives of the California Redwoods and in the other trees that were growing with them. Hanging from their branches were long catkins bearing the male cones, and the shorter female cones were also developing on the trees. In March, at the time of our visit, the trees were bare of leaves, having shed them last November. Milton Silverman, Science Writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, and I flew across the Pacific and up the Yangtze valley to Chungking how we took a river boat down to Wan-Hsien and then walked over the steep and slippery trails for three days to Mo-tao-chi and for two days more to Shui-sapa. The details of the trip have been told elsewhere-how Dr.
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I wanted to see how it lived and with what other trees it was associated.” That was on Januless than two months later, Chaney was in Modaoqi, marveling at the newly found tree, shooting roll after roll of photographs, and absorbing information on the climate and topography of the tree’s native region and on the plants that grew around it. Chaney wrote that when he received seeds of Metasequoia from China, “the reality of this new tree so impressed me that I decided to visit it in its native home. Hu about the discovery in China of trees that had been thought extinct for millions of years. By 1948, Ralph Chaney-professor of paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley, and passionate advocate for the North American redwoods-had been hearing for a year and a half from his colleague Professor H.