In search of old things in far-flung corners of world

From July 19, 2007: Today’s question:

For my summer vacation, I would like to tell people I saw the oldest living thing on earth. If I had adequate vacation time and sufficient funds, where would you recommend I go, and what would I see there? You could just cruise over to Carlsbad, New Mexico, where in 1999 scientists found some bacteria believed to be 250 million years old in ancient sea salt. The bacteria, known as B. permians, were revived in the laboratory after having been held in a state of suspended animation in a hard-cased spore.

Or you could go to Tasmania, where in 1997 researchers found a colony of a plant known as King’s Holly that is believed to 43,000 years old.

The plant seems to be sterile in that it doesn’t have flowers or seeds. It reproduces by root suckering so the colony is really considered to be all one big plant.

Aspen also reproduce by root suckering. There is a 110-acre colony of aspen in Fish Lake National Forest in Utah known as the Pando aspen that is thought to be the world’s largest living organism. Estimates of its age range from 80,000 years to up to 1 million years. I think that sounds like a stretch.

There are bristlecone pine trees in California’s White Mountains that are thought to be about 4,000 years old. One, named Methuselah after the real old guy in the Bible, is thought to be 4,767 years old, but you’re going to have trouble finding it because the U.S. Forest Service won’t say where it is.

And there is a creosote bush out in the Mojave Desert that probably first saw the light of day 11,000 years ago.

This is kind of weird: In some grassland parts of Africa grows something called pyrogenic geoxylic suffrutices. They are essentially underground forests with only the crowns and the tips of a few branches sticking out. They are more or less immune to fire, grazing or drought.

Nobody knows for sure how old they are, but estimates range from 10,000 years to hundreds of thousands.