172 Page Street at Moreland Terrace –Liriodendron tulipifera, Tulip Magnolia

Liriodendron tulipifera

Can you hear the low-frequency infrasound calls of the duck-billed hadrosaurs vibrating to the soles of your feet or smell the flatulence of the long-necked sauropods browsing on the leaves of the prehistoric Liriodendron? This was a common daily routine in the Cretaceous period, when flowering Angiosperms like the Magnolia family evolved and when dinosaurs ruled the Earth.

With distinctive square lobed leaf structure, large green and orange tulip-shaped flowers, and woody cone-like seeds, the prehistoric tulip tree is relatively unchanged since the Early Cretaceous period, 145 to 100.5 million years ago, when dinosaurs roamed North America.

Liriodendron tulipifera or tulip tree is a stately, fast-growing, upright, pyramidal tree that broadens with spreading growth as it matures. The native tulip tree reaches over 150 feet in the wild and matures at 80’ by 40’ under urban conditions. The tulip tree is found in deciduous forests east of the Mississippi River, and as far south as northern Florida, and as far north as southern Ontario.

References:

1. Aaron O Richardson, Danny W. Rice, Gregory J. Young, Andrew J. Alverson, Jeffrey D. Palmer. The "fossilized" mitochondrial genome of Liriodendron tulipifera: Ancestral gene content and order, ancestral editing sites, and extraordinarily low mutation rate. BMC Biology, 2013; 11 (1): 29 DOI: 10.1186/1741-7007-11-29
2. Ian Small. Mitochondrial genomes as living ‘fossils’. BMC Biology, 2013; 11 (1): 30 DOI: 10.1186/1741-7007-11-30
3. Michael A. Dirr, Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, Stipes Publishing, 1998, 572-574
4. Kim Smith, 2012, https://kimsmithdesigns.com/tag/tulip-poplar/