Fascinating facts about trees

Three trillion is an estimation of the number of trees on Earth. Sounds a lot but it is around 47% less than 12,000 years ago, before man really got in to agriculture and the resulting deforestation.

Of the over 60,000 species of tree known to science, more than half are endemic (occur naturally) in only one country. The countries with the highest number of endemic species are Brazil (named after the brazilwood tree), Colombia and Indonesia.

Earth has only had trees for the last 470 million of its 4.5 billion years (approximately), before that, the planet had weird fungi-like growths called Prototastites which had thick trunks and reached about 8 metres high.

The most ancient living tree on the planet is the Ginkgo biloba, they were around 200 million years ago and have hardly changed since.

Another ancient tree is the Wollemia, which was believed to have been extinct for 150 million years until a mature specimen was discovered in an Australian national park in 1994. There are only around 80 mature Wollemia trees on the planet.