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As far as we can tell, Alice, the trees are just as mortal as we humans, although their lifespans tend to be somewhat longer than ours. We learned this by performing a Yahoo! search on "oldest trees," which, when we clicked on "Go to Web Page Matches," yielded some very useful results. While it's a far cry from immortality, a Ancient Bristlecone Pine named "Methuselah" is said to be 4,766 years old, more than a thousand years older than any other living tree. The site describes the discovery of the tree in California's White-Inyo Mountains, the characteristics of bristlecone pines in general, and dendrochronology -- the science of dating trees by
their rings. We also found a related dendrochronology site called Climate Tracker: Tree Ring* that offers a chart of climate swings from the past 7000 years, which is how scientists manage to conclusively determine the birthdates of older trees. From our original search results, we went on a virtual field trip to some of "tallest, biggest, and oldest trees" in the world, complete with photos and a running narration by an expert guide. Finally, we searched on "oldest trees." That led us to a very cool site called Record Setting Life*, which describes several recent discoveries about Earth's oldest creatures. It seems that Methuselah lost its
crown as "oldest living thing" to a 9,000-year-old cluster of bushes in the Mojave desert, which was eventually dethroned by "40-million-year-old bacteria found in the stomach of an insect encased in amber." But don't feel bad for Methuselah. In 1999 the 40-million-year-old germ was shown up by a 250-million-year-old bacteria found in ancient sea salt beneath Carlsbad, New Mexico. Now if that's not immortality, it's pretty darn close...
* Sorry, these web sites are no longer available.
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