''Carpinus putoensis'' (Putuo hornbeam, ) is a species of
plant
Plants are predominantly photosynthetic eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae. Historically, the plant kingdom encompassed all living things that were not animals, and included algae and fungi; however, all current definitions of Plantae exclu ...
in the family
Betulaceae
Betulaceae, the birch family, includes six genera of deciduous nut-bearing trees and shrubs, including the birches, alders, hazels, hornbeams, hazel-hornbeam, and hop-hornbeams numbering a total of 167 species. They are mostly natives of the ...
. It is a small tree, up to tall.
It is
endemic
Endemism is the state of a species being found in a single defined geographic location, such as an island, state, nation, country or other defined zone; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also found else ...
to
Zhoushan archipelago in
China where it survives as a single tree on
Putuo Island
Mount Putuo (, from Sanskrit: "Mount Potalaka") is an island in Putuo District, Zhoushan, Putuo District, Zhoushan, Zhejiang, China. It is a renowned site in Chinese Buddhism and is the bodhimaṇḍa of the bodhisattva Guanyin.
Mount Putuo ...
. It is
monoecious, thereby in principle still able to reproduce sexually in the wild.
According to
Edward O. Wilson
Edward Osborne Wilson (June 10, 1929 – December 26, 2021) was an American biologist, naturalist, entomologist and writer. According to David Attenborough, Wilson was the world's leading expert in his specialty of myrmecology, the study of a ...
, this is an example of what
conservation biologist
Conservation biology is the study of the conservation of nature and of Earth's biodiversity with the aim of protecting species, their habitats, and ecosystems from excessive rates of extinction and the erosion of biotic interactions. It is an int ...
s call "living dead" species.
References
Further reading
* Wilson, Edward O. ''The Future of Life''. Vintage Books, New York: 2002. p. 89
Endemic flora of China
Trees of China
Critically endangered plants
putoensis
Flora of Zhejiang
Endlings
Taxonomy articles created by Polbot
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