Since the first report on the wood anatomy of Japanese conifers by Yaroku Nakamura in 1882, Japanese wood anatomists have continued to publish descriptions of the anatomical characteristics of Japanese woody plants for more than 100 years. Descriptions of foreign timber species started later and have appeared to a great extent to meet the demand of the Japanese timber industry since 1960s. The wood antomical identification systems started as dichotomous keys, then evolved into multiple-entry keys usually employing sorting cards, and finally developed into computerized keys with the recent prevalence of personal computers. Reflecting the maturity of the wood anatomical studies in Japan, various types of textbooks, guidebooks, and atlases have come to be published. IAWA has been providing an international meeting ground to Japanese wood anatomists to exchange research results and ideas with foreign researchers.

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Boreal coniferous forests in Japan were dominated by Picea during the Last Glacial Age. Extant Picea species have fairly similar morphology, and identification of fossil Picea species is often difficult even from its cone. We tried to identify Picea fossils using chloroplast DNA sequence. We collected fossil samples of the Last Glacial Age in the Tohoku District. DNA regions examined were two intergenic spacer regions about 200 base pairs selected by comparing DNA sequences among extant Japanese Picea species. Fossil DNA was sequenced by the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). We succeeded in sequencing five cones from Dekijima and one branchlet from Mameda, Aomori Prefecture. The sequences of five cones agreed with that of extant P. glehnii, and that of the branchlet with extant P. koyamae and P. shirasawae. Morphological identification of the five fossil cones resulted in two P. glehnii and one P. maximowiczii cones, and the remaining two not identifiable because of poor preservation. Although the fossil branchlet obtained from Mameda was not identifiable to species, cones collected from the same horizon were identified as P. koyamae. DNA and morphological identifications corresponded except for the cone identified as P. maximowiczii. This study showed a successful DNA analysis of fossil cones and needles and the value of DNA for identifying fossil species.

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