the.com/ginkgo
a living fossil that outlived the dinosaurs and probably your apocalypse plans too
means A tall, ancient tree (Ginkgo biloba) with distinctive fan-shaped leaves, prized as the sole surviving species of an otherwise extinct plant lineage.
from From Japanese, where the tree's Chinese-derived name was written with characters meaning 'silver apricot' (ginkyo) — but a scribal slip turned that 'y' into a 'g' in the Latin name a botanist set down in the early 18th century, and the misspelling stuck. So the word we use is, charmingly, a typo that survived almost as stubbornly as the tree itself. The Chinese root behind it traces to terms describing the plant's silvery, apricot-like seeds.
- age
- basically unchanged for 200 million years
- bomb survivor
- trees lived through Hiroshima's blast
- sole survivor
- only species left in its entire division
- smell warning
- female seeds reek of rancid butter
- separate sexes
- trees are male or female
ginkgo biloba — living fossil tree species, 270 million years old, native to china
ginkgo tree of hiroshima — survived atomic bomb blast in 1945, still alive and growing today
ginkgo avenue beijing — famous 7-km tree-lined street in china's capital, millions of ginkgo trees