Here's a similar movie of air traffic, which degenerates into goofy visual effects near the end:
The modern ginkgo tree is a "living fossil", the only surviving member of the phylum Ginkgophyta, which had its heyday in the Cretaceous, about 145 million years ago. The Cretaceous was the last period when dinosaurs walked the earth. During the cataclysm that killed the dinosaurs, all but two species of the ginkgo family died out. Their range has been contracting almost ever since. It's possible they had evolved to have their seeds dispersed by dinosaurs, in which case they may have been pining away ever since.
(Excuse the pun.)
Ginkgos are marked by some special features: extreme longevity, slow reproduction rate, low population density, and strong "ecological conservatism": they only like light soils around rivers. Presumably all these factors contribute to make ancient ginkgos almost indistinguishable from ginkgos today.
By the time the ice ages began — the end of the Pliocene and the start of the Pleistocene, 1.8 million years ago — they only survived in a certain part of central China.
After the apes evolved into humans and some in Europe became scientists, these western scientists found fossil ginkgo leaves and decided this was an extinct species of plant:
But, they were wrong! The ginkgo had survived in China, mainly in monasteries in the mountains and in palace and temple gardens, where Buddhist monks cultivated the tree starting around 1100 AD. Only a few wild ginkgos are known in China, especially around the southern slope of Jinfo Mountain near the border of Guizhou Province.
The Buddhists monks later took the ginkgo to Japan around 1190...
In 1691, a German physician and botanist named Engelbert Kämpfer, in Japan on a mission with the Dutch East-India Company, found ginkgos in Japan and brought back seeds to Holland. The trees from these first seeds survive today!
They were taken to America in 1784, and by the late 1800s it had become a popular tree for city streets on east coast urban areas. Now Ginkgo biloba is fashionable for its medical properties.
In short: its story continues! For more:
Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry, of labor and capital — all undreamed of by the Fathers — the whole structure of modern life was impressed into the service of economic royalists. It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control of government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. - Franklin Roosevelt
© 2008 John Baez
baez@math.removethis.ucr.andthis.edu