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Sequoia (genus)

Sequoia
Temporal range: Jurassic to present
Redwood tree in Oakland California (person for comparison)IMG 4881.jpg
Redwoods in Oakland, California
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Plantae
Division: Pinophyta
Class: Pinopsida
Order: Pinales
Family: Cupressaceae
Subfamily: Sequoioideae
Genus: Sequoia
Endl., conserved name
Species
Synonyms
  • Condylocarpus Salisb. ex Lamb.
  • Gigantabies J.Nelson

Sequoia is a genus of redwood coniferous trees in the subfamily Sequoioideae of the family Cupressaceae. The only extant species of the genus is Sequoia sempervirens in the Northern California coastal forests ecoregion of Northern California and Southwestern Oregon in the United States. The two other genera, Sequoiadendron and Metasequoia, in the subfamily Sequoioideae are closely related to Sequoia. It includes the largest trees in the world.

Several extinct species have been named from fossils, including Sequoia affinis, Sequoia chinensis of China, Sequoia langsdorfii, Sequoia dakotensis of South Dakota (Maastrichtian), and Sequoia magnifica.

The name Sequoia was first published as a genus name by the Austrian botanist Stephan Endlicher in 1847. However, he left no specific reasons for choosing that name, and there is no record of anyone else speaking to him about its origin.

The most common modern guess is that Endlicher, a published linguist as well as a botanist, named the genus in honor of Sequoyah, the inventor of the first Cherokee writing system. As far back as the 1860s, it has also been suggested that the name is instead an alteration of the Latin word for "sequence", since the species is known to be a follower or remnant of massive ancient, extinct species, and thus the next in a sequence.


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Wikipedia

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