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The 12-by-20-square-foot space was outfitted last summer with roughly 140 plants representative of the late Cretaceous: spiky palms, feathery metasequoia, frilly ferns.

Plant fossils may include ancestors of modern-day maples, oaks, alder, sycamore and metasequoia, a kind of pine tree.

Fossil plants from a metasequoia — an ancient coniferous tree, similar to the giant redwoods that grow in California today — indicate giant trees lined these beaches.

It is home to gardens of oaks, mountain ashes, Asiatic maples, metasequoia and larches, as well as the country’s largest public collection of Japanese maples.

The metasequoia, or dawn redwood, entered a sort of plant limbo in the darkness, neither growing nor showing visible signs of decline.