The tallest and oldest living trees on Earth are both conifers
A coast redwood stands 116.07 metres tall, and a Great Basin bristlecone pine has lived about 4,700 years. Both are conifers, a group with only a little over 600 living species that nonetheless dominates the northern forests and ruled the land through the age of dinosaurs.
Conifers first show up in rocks from the Late Carboniferous, more than 300 million years ago. The earliest were small trees of dry uplands that spread into lowlands as the climate grew more arid. They came through the Permian–Triassic extinction largely unscathed and dominated Mesozoic landscapes until flowering plants radiated explosively in the Late Cretaceous. Many survivors are relics: the Wollemi pine, found in 1994 in Australian sandstone gorges, numbered fewer than 60 wild adults with almost no genetic variation.
Life in the snowy north shaped their design. A conical outline sheds snow, tough water-conducting cells called tracheids resist ice pressure, and waxy needles limit water loss. Dark green foliage may soak up weak high-latitude light, while blue spruce can turn silvery to reflect ultraviolet. Most keep leaves for 2 to 40 years, although larches and dawn redwoods are among five genera that drop them each autumn. Needles range from 2 millimetres on scale-leaved species to 600 millimetres on some pines.
Their wood is simple and uniform, with tracheids making up more than 90 percent of timber volume. Resin canals deliver oleoresin, a blend of turpentine and rosin, that floods any wound, trapping insects and blocking fungi before hardening into a seal; the Gitxsan people collect this rosin as a fire starter in wet weather. Fine roots near the surface partner with fungi that improve water and mineral uptake.
Every conifer relies on wind to carry pollen between separate male and female cones. Seed development can take one year in firs and spruces, two in most pines and three in the stone pine. Some fire-adapted pines hold seeds in sealed cones for years until heat opens them, and nutcrackers and jays spread nut-like pine seeds. As of 2025, 94 species are endangered and 30 critically so, even as conifers underpin the timber and paper trades.
Source: Conifer
