Ancient Amazon trees documented in historical record
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In 1819, botanist Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, naturalist Johann Baptist von Spix, and their team encountered trees with enormous trunks in the Amazon rainforest near present-day Parintins, Brazil.
Martius recorded trees with circumferences up to 25.5 meters, requiring fifteen people to encircle their bases. He estimated these trees were between 2,052 and 4,104 years old, potentially predating the time of Christ.
While the expedition team could not identify the species, local people called them “jataí” or “jutaí”, the size of the trees deeply impressed Martius, who noted they had lived through the rise and fall of entire civilizations. More than two centuries later, researchers continue to study giant trees in the Amazon, recently reaching an 88.5-meter-tall angelim-vermelho, a tree estimated to be 400 to 600 years old.
Martius’s observations became part of Flora Brasiliensis, a major botanical work produced between 1840 and 1906. Today, the Flora Brasiliensis is available online through a collaborative project of the Centro de Referência em Informação Ambiental (CRIA), Unicamp, and the Missouri Botanical Garden, preserving information on over 22,000 species. CRIA continues to connect biodiversity data with technology to support conservation efforts across Latin America.
