explorers due to genetic evidence from a cultivated specimen from the year 1800. Before extinction, Sophora toromiro was a common part of the island's natural vegetation, particularly in the dry forest and shrublands.

Heavy deforestation had eliminated most of Easter Island's forests by the first half of the 17th century, and the once common toromiro became rare and ultimately extinct in the wild in the 1960s. The last wild specimen was a plant in Rano Kao in