While all the other trees died, the gingkoes had slowly begun to grow again.

But within months, people started to notice something odd. Only about 10,000 of the gingkoes that had made their way to Japan 500 years earlier were left standing in the city. In 1923, a catastrophic earthquake struck just south of Tokyo with a magnitude of 7.9, setting the city ablaze. Once they got there, the evolutionary toughness of these “living fossils” was tested a second time by destructive forces that strangely set the stage for their eventual survival at Hiroshima. Crane estimates that between 13, the trees made their way to Japan. But eventually, they begun to spread once again, with a little help from humans. Having survived the mass extinction, this tiny enclave of tough Chinese gingkoes was quiet for a few million years. “At the end of the last ice age, it was down to a few restricted populations in China, from which all the living gingkoes that we see today are descended, whether they’re in Manhattan or Tokyo or San Francisco or Seoul,” says Crane. “A lot of trees are resilient, but gingko seems particularly so,” Crane tells Inverse, “But the thing you have to remember is that there’s a huge paradox at the heart of this gingko story and that is it very nearly went extinct.” But while these roughly 170 gingko trees are now famous for surviving the Hiroshima blast, gingkoes as a species have persisted through a 200-million-year history of close calls that laid the foundation for its ability to withstand the A-bomb attack, explains Sir Peter Crane, Ph.D., director of Yale’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Those trees, now dubbed “A-bombed trees,” or hibakujumoku, are still in Hiroshima today, monuments to both humanity’s capacity for destruction and nature’s ability to withstand us at our worst. Little was left standing, but somehow the gingko trees were able to weather one of the most destructive moments in human history. Disaster rained down upon the city, killing an estimated 150,000 people and leveling both the biological and man-made landscape. On August 6, 1945, an Allied plane dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, creating a fireball 1,200 feet in diameter.

Peter crane ginkgo