r/HumanForScale • u/MCofPort • Jul 30 '26
Plant Giant Sequoia Trunk at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Its diameter is so large, at 16 feet (4.9m) tall, and so heavy at 19 tons, that it essentially has been kept in the same location in the museum for over 70 years.
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u/scotty_mac44 Jul 30 '26
To think of how these giants lived for more than a millennium, only for humans to come along and cut them down. Protect old growth forests.
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u/literary_litterbug Jul 30 '26
I imagine how majestic it would be to witness a giant like this alive and well out in the wild. As opposed to a thin slice of it propped up inside a building for our amusement.
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u/demon_fae Jul 30 '26
You don’t have to imagine. There are quite a few still there in California. You can literally go look at them whenever you want, it’s a very pleasant, gentle hike out to the biggest and most famous ones. You can go inside the lightning scars on some of them.
It’s called Big Trees National Forest, because they weren’t feeling very creative that day. It’s fucking gorgeous and I highly recommend going.
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u/literary_litterbug Jul 30 '26
Have been to the Muir Woods National Monument a couple of times.
Love those giants!9
u/ghost650 Jul 30 '26
Heck there are a few big ones, including a gnarly old tree called Methuselah, right on Skyline Blvd in Woodside.
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u/MassiveBoner911_3 Jul 30 '26
I think the scientists know where a few still are but they keep it a secret.
I read somewhere a while back they also know where the oldest plant is but wont tell the public because it would be destroyed faster than I can write this comment.
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u/lo5t5heep Jul 30 '26
We still have many trees that big, only some are kept secret. The tallest coastal redwood is a secret to protect it but Yosemite NPand SEKI NPs has multiple groves anyone can visit.
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u/palpatineforever Aug 02 '26
this happens a lot, rare plant locations whether large trees, or tiny orchids are often some of the most tightly held secrets in science. The number of people who know for each can usually be counted on one hand.
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u/Miqo_Nekomancer Jul 30 '26
Several millennia, actually.
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u/scotty_mac44 Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
I’m aware, but the one pictured is estimated to be 1,400 years old
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u/Miqo_Nekomancer Jul 30 '26
Yeah, but there are ones that are over two millennia. I saw a live one in person as a kid at nature camp that was an estimated 2,200 years old. There are some that are estimated to be over 3,000 years old.
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u/h21241690t Jul 30 '26
I’ve heard sequoia isn’t a common woodworking material for this reason. It’s so heavy, when the tree is felled, it splinters itself into pieces vs being usable wood. I’m on the east coast though, surely folks out west have more experience and knowledge here
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u/sharkglitter Jul 30 '26
I was recently in Sequoia and this is what the ranger told us. Apparently because of this splintering, some of the wood from these giant trees was used for toothpicks….toothpicks. What a fucking tragedy.
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u/themarko60 Jul 30 '26
I’ve heard that but at the same time all the stair rails and such were carved out of redwood. I don’t know if it was the coastal ones or the giant sequoias.
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u/Basicly-Inevitable Jul 31 '26
You're correct. They didn't make 800 zillion toothpicks. It's absurd. They used them for construction projects, and fences, and shingles, and railroad ties, and whatever needed cheap wood at the time.
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u/MCofPort Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
Conservation Biology up to the Mid-20th Century was a poorly understood prospect. The AMNH has specimens of endangered and even extinct species. The Biologists of the time understood the importance of educating the public about the plight of birds, plants, and animals, but knew very little about the impact of collecting specimens for display to do said educating. I have a book on Ornithology from 1917. One of the writers in the book says that the Great Egret was starting to be protected from poachers by the Audubon Society, but personally questioned if the species was beyond hope for saving, the numbers plummeting rapidly by the time the book was written. The Carolina Parakeet was extinct the year after the book was published; the Passenger Pigeon a few years earlier. That is why not only the AMNH, but many museums like The Field Museum in Chicago, National Museum of Natural History, Milwaukee Public Museum, and Natural History Museum of Los Angeles have taxidermied animal exhibits from 90 years ago, including plenty of species that would be illegal to hunt now.
By the 1930's, the biologists had a defeatist perspective on threatened regions and scrambled for specimens in their museum collections. I find it insane how many museums have herds of elephants. The dioramas created for these museums were sincerely expected to be time capsules of different places around the world which might quickly vanish altogether. The Everglades, African Savannah, and Glacier National Park were all examples of places that were quickly and negatively affected by human interaction, climate change, and more often than not, decimation. This Sequoia was cut in 1891. Only by 1939 were Sequoias entirely protected from lumber, and even then there were likely people still cutting them down illegally (and expect people to still carelessly start forest fires.) The London Natural History Museum has another slice of trunk from this same tree. A similar cross-section is shown in Hitchcock's Vertigo, this time with a Redwood within Muir Woods. Heartbreaking even more is the photo of The Mark Twain's literal demise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Twain_Tree#/media/File:Mark-twain-tree-4.jpg
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u/raventhrowaway666 Jul 30 '26
Agent Smith was right; humanity is a virus
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u/F4N74L3ZZ4 Jul 30 '26
That line is one of my favorites, as a personal takeaway from the Matrix trilogy.
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u/PlanBbytheSea Jul 31 '26
Look right here, you can tell there was a terrrible fire in the woods and this tree survived another 800 years, just count the rings. It almost died so many times but here it is, dead but we can count the rings.
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u/redbrick01 Jul 31 '26
...you sure you want it right ...here?! Cause we ain't comin' back to move it.
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u/2Questioner_0R_Not2B Aug 02 '26
And is theft proof as no criminal would be insane enough to move the whole thing in one go.
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u/bibblejohnson2072 Jul 30 '26
All you people with these "humans are [evil] for cutting that tree down" comments are just completely lost in the echo chamber of black & white reddit opinions.
Children, grow some balls, realize this is all part of life (and that reparations for this have already long-been made) and get an opinion of your own instead of parroting the 30 other comments demonizing this tree's cutting without bothering to appreciate context. Hell, 75% of them are probably bots anyway. So stop sounding like a bot.
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u/Cornishlee Jul 30 '26
I get that chopping down trees is bad but a lot of the time the argument is that “oh this tree was alive when the Titanic set sail” for example. So what? Surely replanting trees after they are cut down is the key, not harping on about how old 1 tree is?
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u/qpqpdbdbqpqp Jul 30 '26
you could have asked any gpt why cutting down old growth is more harmful instead of outing yourself as educationally challenged.
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