Ginkgo: a living fossil on your street
Pick up a ginkgo leaf on a city street and you are holding a shape that appears, almost unchanged, in rock from the Jurassic. The genus has been running the same design for over 200 million years.
What "living fossil" actually means
The phrase is loose and slightly misleading. Ginkgo biloba is not identical to its Jurassic relatives — it is the sole survivor of a group that once had many species across both hemispheres. What persisted is the body plan, not the exact organism.
Saved by monasteries
By the last ice ages, ginkgo had retreated to a small area of China. Its survival owes a great deal to cultivation: temple gardens kept it going for centuries when wild populations were nearly gone. It reached Europe in the 1700s and turned out to be almost absurdly well suited to cities:
- tolerates air pollution
- resists most insects and fungal disease
- survives compacted soil and road salt
- regrows readily after damage
Six ginkgos within two kilometres of the Hiroshima hypocentre survived 1945 and are still alive.
The smell
Female trees produce a fleshy seed coat containing butyric acid — the compound responsible for the aroma of rancid butter. Most cities plant male clones for this reason. The trait is probably ancient: it likely attracted animals that no longer exist, which is why nothing today particularly wants to carry ginkgo seeds anywhere.
Cover image: Erdbaer — CC0 (source).
