A species
Giant sequoia
Sequoiadendron giganteum
The world's largest trees by wood in the trunk, able to live for over 3,000 years
You and the giant sequoia last shared an ancestor about 1.8 billion years ago (on 28 July, if life's history were one year).
The giant sequoia is the largest single tree on Earth by the wood in its trunk, and trees can live for over 3,000 years. It is a conifer, a seed plant with cones instead of flowers, so its neighbours here are the flowering plants. It shares the redwood group with two close relatives, the coast redwood, which includes the world's tallest tree, and China's dawn redwood. Each of the three is the only living species left in its genus, its own small group.
Each tree grows as one straight column with thick, spongy, cinnamon-red bark cut by deep furrows. Ancient trees lose their lower limbs and carry a small dark crown high above the ground, with blue-green, scale-like needles. Wild trees reach about 75 to 90 metres tall. The biggest known tree by trunk volume, General Sherman, holds about 1,500 cubic metres of wood, and its trunk weighs about as much as 15 adult blue whales.
Wild sequoias grow only on the western slopes of California's Sierra Nevada, in about 75 groves. They stand scattered among other trees such as firs and pines, and almost never grow in forests of only sequoias. Their egg-shaped cones are only about 6 centimetres long, and thick bark and high branches help them survive gentle ground fires.
Grows a tree's worth of wood each year
A large sequoia adds about one cubic metre of new wood each year, about as much wood as in a 15-metre-tall tree about 30 centimetres wide.
A name that means gigantic tree
The name honours Sequoyah, the Cherokee scholar, while 'dendron' means tree and 'giganteum' means gigantic.
Redwoods once grew far and wide
Relatives of these redwoods once grew across much of the Northern Hemisphere.