Most of us are captivated by the thought of a “living fossil”, which is any organism that appeared millions of years ago in the fossil record and survives today, relatively unchanged.
The maidenhair tree, Ginkgo biloba, ticks all the boxes of this definition. The genus Ginkgo is well known in China and Japan where it has special significance in Buddhism and Confucianism, and first became known to European botanists in the late 1600s.
