are limited to seeds, leaves, and secondary wood of the Upper Cretaceous (Boeshore and Gray 1936, Chaney 1950). The records indicated that the distribution of the genus in past geological times was much wider than the present distribution. A fossil named T. antigua, which has some characteristics in common with T. taxifolia and T. californica, was described from the Mid-Cretaceous of North Carolina and was also collected from the near MacBride's Ford, Georgia (Boeshore and Gray 1936)." Fossil pollen of genus Torreya and other genera within Taxaceae is generally deemed indistinguishable, one from another, and also from genera within families Taxodiaceae and Cupressaceae. Therefore, it is difficult to support past presence or absence of such genera in geographic locales where macrofossil plant material is rare or absent, even if substantial pollen (as in Quaternary bogs) is available. Nonetheless, because the Torreya genus entails sister species of a strongly disjunct distribution pattern of geographic ranges throughout the Northern Hemisphere, with macrofossil evidence at northerly latitudes during warm episodes of the Tertiary Period, it is clear that the eastern North American species of genus Torreya occupied more northerly habitats during many millions of years of history prior to the Quaternary glaciation. The relictual character of the historically native range of this conifer species has been recognized for more than a century. The 1884 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture (USA) characterizes Torreya taxifolia (for which "Stinking Yew" and "Savin" are listed as common names): "No doubt the Torreya is a relic of a past epoch, when it may have had a wide range at the time when the elephant and mastodon were denizens of this country." Botanist Henry C. Cowles visited the area in 1904 and his observations were quoted at length by two colleagues, John M. Coulter and W.J.G. Land in a 1905 paper in Botanical Gazette. Cowles observed that torreya in the wild, "were associated with a remarkable and somewhat extensive group of northern mesophytic plants, and the conclusion is irresistible that Torreya is a northern plant of the most pronounced mesophytic tendencies, and to be associated with such forms as the beech-maple-hemlock forms of our northern woods, our most mesophytic type of association." Ecology Habitat Torreya taxifolia occurs along limestone bluffs of the eastern shore of the Apalachicola River in a region with a warm and humid climate, occasionally influenced in winter by cold waves from the north