Botanists Found a New Species of Enormous Ancient Trees—And They’re Going Extinct

Trees shouldn’t be elusive. They don’t move a whole lot. Yet, we’re still identifying new types of trees, even gigantic ones so big you’d think we would’ve discovered them years ago.

In 2019, botanist Andrea Bianchi, along with local plant experts Aloyce and Ruben Mwakisoma, discovered a massive tree species in Tanzania’s Udzungwa Mountains that had never been seen before. It stood a mighty 40 meters tall (131 feet) and is believed to be around 2,000 years old.

Now, after years of research to find out exactly what these new trees were, we can finally give them a name. It’s called the Tessmannia princeps, and it was found in the Boma La Mzinga and Uluti Village Land Forest Reserves.

Botanists Found a New Species of Enormous 3,000-Year-Old Trees

There aren’t that many of them and they’re not very well distributed, so this newly discovered tree is already under threat of extinction. The species is vital to its local ecosystem as it acts as a kind of bridge that connects two ancient Tanzanian forests.

As you’d expect, its age was determined by its growth rings, which found that some of the oldest could be well over 2,000 years old. Don’t worry, they didn’t chop any down to count their rings. They based that estimate off of the ring count of trees that naturally fallen. To get a more exact age would require radiocarbon dating.

Deforestation has threatened its habitat in recent years though there are local efforts to preserve these old-growth forests which themselves provide us carbon storage and a habitat for a wide variety of species vital to maintaining the delicate balance of our ecosystem.

There are only around 1,000 T. princeps. left, and we only just met it.