When “Little Boy” was dropped by the Allied forces on Hiroshima in 1945, the city’s temperature rose to 7,000°F two miles from ground zero within the first three seconds of the blast.
All forms of life within the radius of the bomb blast died instantly. Buildings melted and the once-vibrant city of Hiroshima was reduced to ashes by the fire from Little Boy. Forbes.
However, something survived the devastating bomb and became a story of resilience. Six ginkgo biloba trees, growing just a mile from the epicenter, withstood the hot temperatures and the fire.
It was just another day for them to survive and continue their lineage.
Despite being stripped of leaves and charred branches from the blast, six trees regenerated within months.
Trees, also known as “living fossils,” have experienced ice ages, mass extinctions, and thousands of Earth’s climate changes.
The reason Ginkgo biloba is called a living fossil is because the tree dates back more than 290 million years to the Permian period and has survived the mass extinction. National Geographic.
This was a mass extinction event so bad that it left 96% of all marine species and three out of every four species on land dead, with forests wiped out and not revived until 10 million years later. .
Of the five mass extinctions, the Permian-Triassic is the only one that wiped out large numbers of insects. This evolution was so intense that it took four to eight million years for marine ecosystems to recover.
This era predates the time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Ginkgo biloba survived and remained the same for thousands of years with the fan-shaped structure of the leaves.
They thrived in Laurasia—the northern subcontinent—for millions of years until the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Many species were wiped out, but the Ginkgos remained strong. By the end of the Pleistocene, they had become isolated from the population in China. They could have faced extinction, but they survived because of their resilience and surprisingly, humanity helped them to overcome this challenge.
Until the early 20th century, living fossils were thought to be extinct in the wild, but when small populations were rediscovered in remote areas of China, they were found to be thriving.
Researchers have speculated that they were preserved by Buddhist monks.
Today, Ginkgos are widespread in city streets, parks and many other places around the world. They are resistant to the pollution, pests and harsh weather that urban life entails.