CLASSIFICATION OF REDWOOD TREES DIVISION GYMNOSPERMS Producing seeds without protective casings. ORDER CONIFERAIE Conifers Long straight grained trunks. Soft wood and seed bearing cones. Evolved 100 million years ago. The dominant forest 30 million years ago. Limited to the Temperate Zone of the Northern Hemisphere. FAMILY TAXODIACEA Swamp Cypress Round cones and needle shaped leaves. GENUS SEQUOIA SEMPERVIRENS Coastal Redwoods Sequoia for Chief Sequoah of the Cherokee Nation and 'semper virens' translates as 'always living' from the Latin. These are the tallest trees in the world. Living record is 367.8 feet. Average age is 800 years. Living record is 2200 yrs. The bole (trunk) is straight, the top tapers to a spire and the base flares. The root system of Coastal Redwood trees runs between 6 and 10 feet deep, radiating to a maximum of 50'. These Redwoods replace their needles on a rotating (rather than annual) basis and in addition to producing seeds they send new shoots up from the birdseyes at their base and in their root systems. The California Redwoods also have in common fibrous bark (often 1 to 2 feet thick), a reddish brown heartwood, an absence of resin cells and an abundance of tannin.         The Sempervirens cones are less than 1" in diameter and the seeds only 1/16th ". An estimated 123,00 seeds per pound. (Now that's information compression technology!) The cones of the Giant Sequoia run slightly larger (1 1/2" to 2 1/2") with seeds running 91,00 per pound. GENUS SEQUOIA GIGANTAEA Giant Redwoods The world's largest trees in girth and mass. the oldest 3,000 yrs. The oldest living tree is a California Bristlecone Pine (4,900 yrs). Virtually all remaining Giant Redwood trees are held in public trust       GENUS METASEQUOIA GLYPTOSTROBIADES Dawn Redwood Identical to the tree captured in the fossil record. Only a few survived the millenia and were discovered in 1944 in an isolated valley of Central China.