In 1943, a Chinese forester from the National Bureau of Forest Research (NBFR) in Chongqing (Nanking), Mr. This publication was essentially unknown to Western scientists until after the World War II. The fossils had previously been confused with Taxodium (bald cypress) and Sequoia (redwoods).

In 1941 Shigeru Miki (1903-1974), a Japanese paleobotanist, established a new genus, Metasequoia, to accommodate Pliocene fossils from deposits about five million years old. The account of the discovery and subsequent activities has since been updated and corrected by Jinshuang Ma in two publication, Aliso 21(2) :65-75(2002) and Harvard Papers in Botany 8(1):9-18 (2003) The Story of the Discovery and Naming of Dawn RedwoodĪn excellent description of the discovery of Metasequoia glyptostroboides by scientists in the 1940s is in, A Reunion of Trees, by Stephen A.