Dawn Redwood

The dawn redwood is Oregon's official state fossil, designated in 2005. It is a large conifer whose leaf impressions, twigs, and cones are preserved in the Eocene Clarno Formation of Wheeler County, one of the richest fossil plant sites in the American West.

For most of the twentieth century, Metasequoia was known only from fossils. When a living grove was found in rural China in 1944, it became one of the most celebrated botanical discoveries of the century. Oregon's fossils record the same tree as it grew across North America 40 to 50 million years ago.

The dawn redwood was a large, straight-trunked conifer that could exceed 100 feet in height. Unlike most conifers, it was deciduous — it shed its soft, feathery needles each fall. The needles grew in opposite pairs along the branch, giving each twig a flat, fern-like appearance that preserved well in fine-grained lake sediments.

It produced small, round cones about an inch wide. The bark was reddish-brown and fibrous, similar to the coastal redwood. Oregon's Clarno fossils include impressions of needles, twigs, and cones clear enough to confirm the species matches the trees still growing in China today.

During the Eocene, roughly 40 to 56 million years ago, dawn redwoods grew across a broad band of the Northern Hemisphere — from Alaska and the Pacific Northwest through Europe and Asia. Oregon sat in a warm, wet lowland forest where the tree thrived alongside palms, figs, and early relatives of oaks.

Japanese paleobotanist Shigeru Miki described the genus Metasequoia in 1941 from fossil material, naming it for its resemblance to the giant sequoia and coast redwood. At the time, no living specimens were known, and Metasequoia was classified as an extinct genus.

In 1944, a Chinese forester named T. Kan discovered an unfamiliar tree growing in the village of Modaoxi in Hubei Province. Botanist Hsueh Chi-Ju confirmed the identification in 1946: the tree was a living Metasequoia. The Arnold Arboretum at Harvard organized a seed-collecting expedition in 1948, and dawn redwoods were soon planted at universities and botanical gardens across the United States.

Oregon adopted the dawn redwood as its state fossil in 2005. The choice recognized the Clarno Formation's exceptional plant fossil record and connected Oregon's ancient landscape to one of the most surprising botanical rediscoveries of the twentieth century.

The Clarno Formation in Wheeler County holds Oregon's best dawn redwood fossils. The Clarno Unit of John Day Fossil Beds National Monument preserves Eocene plant material — leaves, twigs, seeds, and cones — in mudstone layers laid down by ancient floods and volcanic debris flows about 40 to 54 million years ago. Metasequoia is among the most common plants identified from those layers.

Specimens from the Clarno Formation are held at the Thomas Condon Paleontology Center in the Sheep Rock Unit of John Day Fossil Beds, where researchers and visitors can study Oregon's deep fossil plant record.