Steve Sillett smiled as he told a recent after-hours gathering at New York’s American Museum of Natural History about the slice of the Mark Twain redwood tree.

Loggers cut down the tree in 1891. A slice was sent from California to the U.S. East Coast and wound up in the museum to teach the rest of the country about the mammoth trees, still believed to be the largest beings that have ever lived on the planet.

Now Sillett has his own message about redwoods.

The botanist, profiled in Richard Preston’s recent book, “The Wild Trees” has climbed some of the tallest known redwoods. Hundreds of feet high in the canopy he discovered the trees support a lost world of plants and animals, some of them previously unknown to scientists.

Pink earthworms, lungless salamanders, and plankton live in the soil and water that collects in spaces of the trees where lightening and wind storms have broken off their trunks and limbs. Bushes, lichen and other trees also live high up in the redwoods, which can grow new trucks when the old ones rot off after injury. After studying a plot of more than 100 redwoods for 10 years, Sillett found only a handful of the gnarliest, injured trees supported the great variety of life. The trees that were not hit by storms, some of them the tallest of the bunch, supported almost no other life. He calls them “boring.” Before loggers cut down 96 percent of the original redwood stands, the great diversity of life supported by the gnarly trees probably spanned from Big Sur, California to Southern Oregon.

“If we were going to try to restore old growth forest, it might be actually feasible to focus our attention on a few trees in the forest because those trees are carrying the bulk of the diversity,” Sillett told the gathering at the museum. He wants to accelerate the development of the canopy. “I think it can be done by strategic injury of the tree without compromising their health,” he said.

After the talk he told me the “injuries” he hopes to inflict are cutting off trunks and pulling down limbs of a small sample of redwoods that haven’t been hit by storms.

“I think we might be able to get some of these characteristics back into our managed forest landscape a heck of a lot sooner than if we just drew a line around it and protected it,” he said.

Natural injuries that create gnarly, interesting trees take thousands of years. Sillett hopes that with strategic injuries the remaining redwood stands can begin to be transformed into a kind of a coral reef of the sky in about 100 years.