This tree's closest relatives all went extinct over 60 million years ago
Ginkgo biloba is the sole survivor of a plant lineage stretching back over 200 million years, making it a living fossil with no close relatives at all. The whole group nearly vanished, surviving only in small pockets of China, likely kept alive because Buddhist monks cultivated it in temple gardens for centuries. Its genus name is an 18th-century transcription error: Carl Linnaeus preserved a misreading of the Japanese 'gin-kyo' when he formally named it in 1771.