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Concept
Ginkgo
Summary
Ginkgo is a genus of non-flowering seed plants. The scientific name is also used as the English name. The order to which it belongs, Ginkgoales, first appeared in the Permian, 270 million years ago, and Ginkgo is now the only living genus within the order. The rate of evolution within the genus has been slow, and almost all its species had become extinct by the end of the Pliocene. The sole surviving species, Ginkgo biloba is only found in the wild in China, but is cultivated around the world. The relationships between ginkgos and other groups of plants are not fully resolved.
The ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) is a living fossil, with fossils similar to the modern plant dating back to the Permian, 270 million years ago. The closest living relatives of the clade are the cycads, which share with the extant G. biloba the characteristic of motile sperm. The ginkgo and cycad lineages are thought to have an extremely ancient divergence dating to the early Carboniferous. Fossils attributable to the genus Ginkgo with reproductive organs similar to the modern species first appeared in the Middle Jurassic, and the genus diversified and spread throughout Laurasia during the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous. It declined in diversity as the Cretaceous progressed with the extinction of species such as Ginkgo huolinhensis, and by the Palaeocene, only a few Ginkgo species, Ginkgo cranei and Ginkgo adiantoides, remained in the Northern Hemisphere, while a markedly different (and poorly documented) form persisted in the Southern Hemisphere. At the end of the Pliocene, Ginkgo fossils disappeared from the fossil record everywhere except in a small area of central China, where the modern species survived. It is doubtful whether the Northern Hemisphere fossil species of Ginkgo can be reliably distinguished. Given the slow pace of evolution and morphological similarity between members of the genus, there may have been only one or two species existing in the Northern Hemisphere through the entirety of the Cenozoic: present-day G. biloba (including G.
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