waxy, and grow overlapping one another tightly. As a conifer, the kahikatea has no flowers and instead has cones. Male cones, which occur on different trees to female ones, are 1 cm long and rectangular. The pollen is a pale yellow colour and has a three-pored or trisaccate shape that is distinctive in the New Zealand flora and so can be identified easily. The fruit is highly modified with a yellow-orange fleshy receptacle that is 2.5–6.5 mm long. The purple-black seed is roughly spherical and 4–6 mm in diameter. Both the seed and the ovary are covered with a thin layer of wax. The kahikatea has a diploid chromosome count of 20. Phytochemistry Several different glycosides have been isolated from the leaves; the tricetin 3’,5’-di-O-/β-glucopyranoside and 3’-0-β-xylopyranoside have been found only in the kahikatea. The receptacles and seeds have been found to contain anthocyanins, rare in gymnosperms, which it was suggested in one 1988 paper make the fruit as a whole more attractive to prospective animal dispersers. Taxonomy The kahikatea was first described in 1832 by the French botanist Achille Richard in his Essai d'une Flore de la Nouvelle Zélande (Essay On The Flora of New Zealand) as Podocarpus dacrydioides. There is an earlier record given in the 1825 issue of Mémoires du Muséum d'histoire naturelle as Podocarpus thujoides, but it lacks a description. It was superfluously named Dacrydium excelsum by Allan Cunningham in the 1838 issue of Annals of Natural History, and transferred to the genus Nageia by Otto Kuntze in 1891. It was given its current binomial name, Dacrycarpus dacrydioides, in 1969 by American botanist David de Laubenfels. Etymology Dacrycarpus means tear shaped fruit, and the specific epithet dacrydioides is after its similarity to species in the genus Dacrydium. Common names include kahikatea, from the Māori language, and white pine. Other Māori names recorded by 19th century ethnographers include: katea, kaikatea, koroī, kōaka, kahika, and the name kāī (for the young tree). Evolution A 2022 study in Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, found a phylogeny, or evolutionary tree, in which kahikatea is found to be within a Darcydioid clade. This group of species that share a common ancestor also gave rise to the other Dacrycarpus species as well as those in the genus Darcydium. They suggested it diverged from a common ancestor around 60 million years ago, in the early paleogene. This is represented in the cladogram below. Distribution