If you were dropped into virtually any region of North America 56 million years ago, you probably would not recognize where you had landed. Back then, at the dawn of the Eocene epoch, the earth was warmer and wetter than it is today. A sea had just closed up in the middle of the Great Plains, and the Rocky Mountains had not yet attained their full height. The continent's plant and animal communities were dramatically different. In the Canadian High Arctic, which today harbors relatively few tundra plant species, year-round temperatures above freezing nurtured a rich and diverse flora; Ellesmere Island in far northern Canada, across from the northwestern coast of Greenland, was home to alligators and giant tortoises. What is now the southeastern U.S. was dominated by tropical rain forest, complete with primates. The northeastern U.S., for its part, ranged from broad-leaved (as opposed to needle-leaved) evergreen forest to deciduous forests of ginkgo, viburnum, birch and elm, among other species. The deciduous broad-leaved forests that now cover 11 percent of North America north of Mexico were in their infancy. But that was about to change, with the spread and extraordinary diversification of what would eventually become some of the most ecologically and economically significant woody plants in the world: the acorn-bearing, wind-pollinated trees we call oaks.
Over the course of some 56 million years, oaks, which all belong to the genus Quercus, evolved from a single undifferentiated population into the roughly 435 species found today on five continents, ranging from Canada to Colombia and from Norway to Borneo. Oaks are keystone species, foundational to the functioning of the forests they form across the Northern Hemisphere. They foster diversity of organisms across the tree of life, from fungi to wasps, birds and mammals. They help clean the air, sequestering carbon dioxide and absorbing atmospheric pollutants. And they have shaped human culture, feeding us with their acorns and providing wood to build our homes, furniture and ships. Indeed, oaks have proved so valuable to people that we have immortalized them in legends and myths for centuries.
