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Dinosaur-age Rare Plants Discovered in SW China
More than 3,600 fern trees, whose roots go back to the age of dinosaur, have been discovered in the Dawei Mountain Nature Reserve in Southwest China's Yunnan Province.
The trees cover an area of 2.67 hectares. The tallest tree is 10 meters high with a perimeter of the trunk measured at 5.2 meters. This tree is estimated to be more than 2,000 years old.
This species of fern is a kind of rare plant which existed in the same geological period as the dinosaurs, and almost became extinct due to the affect of the Quaternary period glacier. The trees are called "living fossils" and have been put under State-level protection.
Experts said in Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan, that this species of rare trees is of great significance in studying the relations between the formation of plant species and their geological distribution.
The Dawei Mountain Nature Reserve, in the Hani-Yi Autonomous Prefecture of Honghe, now has more than 153,000 hectares of primitive forests.
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