August 1937 (1925): 84 (96) years ago

Botanical look-alikes...on the other side of the world!
East Asia-Eastern North America are more similar than you might think.
 
This maple specimen was collected in August 1937 by J.R. Steck and R.J. Templeton in Pittsburgh’s Schenley Park. At first look, it is clearly a maple...its leaves have that “mapley” look!  But upon closer inspection, this specimen was collected from a planting. The species is from Japan – Honshū maple or grey-budded snake-bark maple (Acer rufinerve).

Now, check out this doppelgänger specimen, another maple collected by famed Carnegie Museum curator Otto Jennings in late August 1925 in Elk County, Pennsylvania. This similar looking species is found across Eastern North American forests – striped maple (Acer pensylvanicum).  Though you can’t tell from these leaves and stems, the bark also has distinctive striping (hence the name) that is uncannily like its Asian relative species above.
 
There are many species across Eastern North America and far away East Asia that look almost identical at first glance.  Why?  This observation has long been of interest to botanists for centuries, notably by Asa Gray at Harvard in the 1800s. Eastern North America and East Asia are comprised of many shared genera across continents, with species within remarkably similar!  These are called “disjunct” genera, resulting from a shared evolutionary history, with both floras once connected in geological time but have since been separated over many thousands of years. Interestingly, of the shared genera between regions, East Asia comprised roughly two times the number of species within compared to Eastern North America.  A lot of interesting evolutionary studies have been done on this disjunction across these floras, with many more to do!
 
Find these maple specimens and 3,030 more from across the world in the Carnegie Museum Herbarium here: https://midatlanticherbaria.org/portal/collections/list.php?db=328&includecult=1&taxa=Acer&usethes=1&taxontype=2
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