![]() It is said that an oak spends 300 years growing, 300 years living and 300 years in slow decline. Gradually, oaks died off in the far north and other trees better suited to the colder conditions took hold. As temperatures on Earth got cooler 30 or 40 million years ago and some regions became too cool for tropical trees, there was an opportunity for oaks to move south and they took it. ![]() We think oaks originally came into what is now the United States from what is now Canada. ![]() There are no oaks in Antarctica and any found in Australia and New Zealand were introduced, not native. In American forests, oaks are the dominant tree with more biomass than any other tree. New species are still being found in Central America, Southeast Asia, and-mostly-Mexico-where there are almost twice as many oak species as the United States and Canada combined. Oaks are most plentiful across North America, Central America, Europe, and Asia. With 400-plus species, there’s a good chance there’s an oak suited to most places on Earth. Today, you find oaks growing around the globe in all sorts of soil types, elevations, temperatures, and rainfall levels. We’re not quite sure where they began, but in the 56 million years since they first appeared, oaks went from one species in one place to over 400 species that expanded to five continents.
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