The north coast of California has rainforests --
temperate rainforests -- where it can rain more than 100 inches a year.
This is the realm of the Coast Redwood tree.
Its species name is Sequoia sempervirens.
Sequoia sempervirens is the tallest living organism on Earth.
The range of the species goes up to as much as 380 feet tall.
That's 38 stories tall.
These are trees that would stand out in midtown Manhattan.
Nobody knows how old the oldest living Coast Redwoods are
because nobody has ever drilled into any of them
to count their annual growth rings, and, in any case,
the centers of the oldest individuals appear to be hollow.
But it's believed that the oldest living Redwoods
are perhaps 2,500 years old -- roughly the age of the Parthenon --
although it's also suspected that there may be individual trees
that are older than that.
You can see the range of the Coast Redwoods. It's here, in red.
The largest individuals of this species,
the dreadnoughts of their kind, live just on the north coast of California,
where the rain is really intense.
In recent historic times, about 96 percent of the Coast Redwood forest