Giant Sequoia Trunk Section
Tree felled in 1891; about 1,300 years old
Climb the staircase behind the Darwin statue and you come face to face with a slice through the trunk of one of the largest living things on Earth. The giant sequoia grows only on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada in California, and this section, wider than a London bus is long, was cut from a tree that stood more than ninety metres tall. Its bark, thick and fibrous, still clings to the edge, and the pale rings inside spiral inward to the centre where the tree was a seedling in the sixth century, around the time Saint Augustine arrived in Kent.
The rings are the point of the display. Each one records a year of growth, and the museum has marked out a few dates along a radius so you can find the year of the Norman Conquest, the signing of Magna Carta and the Great Fire of London in the wood. Narrow rings mark drought years and broad ones mark good seasons. Sequoias survive so long partly because their bark resists fire and their wood resists rot, and partly because they simply outgrow the threats that kill smaller trees. Standing under the arch, you can also appreciate the terracotta decoration of Waterhouse's building, which frames the slice like a great window.
The tree was felled in 1891 for a lumber company, and this section was shipped around Cape Horn and put on display here in 1893. It has been in the same spot for more than a century, one of the few exhibits to survive every rearrangement of the hall. Today the species is protected and the museum uses the slice to talk about climate, wildfire and the value of ancient forests.
Did You Know? The tree was already about seven hundred years old when the Normans landed in England, and lived another six hundred years after that.
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