Other Gymnosperms

This group gathers Conifers and Other Gymnosperms subcategory members belonging to a genuine gymnosperm family too narrowly represented within this subcategory to justify its own heading here. Its one member, the umbrella pine, Sciadopitys verticillata, is native to Japan and is the sole living species in its own family, Sciadopityaceae, a lineage with no other extant close relatives and, like the ginkgo, sometimes described as a living fossil for a body plan that has remained largely unchanged over a very long span of geological time; its common name borrows the word pine despite no close relationship to the true pines of the family Pinaceae gathered above.