during the cooling of the Plio-Pleistocene epochs. In North America, the genus found refuge as numerous, but small and isolated, populations in California's coastal mountains and the west slope of the Sierras, which still constitute the native range of Torreya californica. Glacial advance was far greater on the eastern side of North America. But there, no mountains offered refuge as far south as the genus apparently needed to retreat. Hence, the only refuge that maintained Torreya through the coldest episodes of the Pleistocene yet also during the warming Holocene were ravines along the east shore of the Apalachicola River of northern Florida. Today, this location entails the entirety of the native range of Torreya taxifolia, thus making it a paleoendemic. Each of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service official documents pertaining to Torreya taxifolia portrays this species as a glacial relict. The 1984 official listing of the species as endangered included this description:"The Florida torreya and other endemics of the Apalachicola River system have received much attention from scientists and local residents. The relictual nature of this area accounts for the presence of many unique species (James, 1967). During recent glaciations, species migrated southward by way of the Apalachicola River system, which served as a refugium during cooling periods. The Apalachicola River is the only Deep River system that has its headwaters in the southern Appalachian Mountains. With the receding of the glaciers, cool moist conditions persisted on the bluffs and ravines of the Apalachicola River after climatic change rendered the surrounding area much drier and warmer." The initial recovery plan in 1986 gave more details on the prehistory, stating, "Torreya is a genus of four or five species from Florida and Georgia, California, China, and Japan. The present geographic distribution of the genus is similar to the distributions of several other plant genera. The distributions, together with fossil evidence, suggest that these genera had wide distributions during the Tertiary Period that were subsequently reduced by climatic changes during the Quaternary (James 1961, Delcourt and Delcourt 1975)." The most recent (2020) recovery plan update states, "Based on fossil records, we can speculate that the geographical range of T. taxifolia included North Carolina and perhaps, it was forced south by glaciers, and when they retreated, it became isolated in small areas of the southeastern United States." This 2020 federal document describes the fossil history in this way: "Fossil records of Torreya