00:01What's the oldest tree on Earth?
00:05The first trees appeared on Earth about 385 million years ago.
00:09Some types of trees live just a few decades,
00:12but others can live for hundreds or even thousands of years.
00:16But what's the oldest tree alive on Earth today?
00:19Until recently, that title belonged to a Great Basin bristlecone pine
00:24in California's White Mountains.
00:26Bristlecone pines grow very slowly in that cold, elevated landscape.
00:30They're known for their longevity,
00:32and this one, nicknamed Methuselah,
00:34was estimated to be 4,845 years old in 2013.
00:39But Methuselah was later displaced by an even older bristlecone pine,
00:43also in the White Mountains,
00:45which was found to be 5,062 years old.
00:48That means that it was beginning to grow
00:50around the time when humans in Africa
00:52were creating the earliest known examples of rock art.
00:56Another pine tree, a Bosnian pine in the mountains of Greece,
01:00is the oldest officially dated tree in Europe at 1,075 years old.
01:05Scientists named it Adonis after the Greek god of desire and beauty,
01:09and the tree took root in 941 A.D.,
01:13when the Vikings were still raiding settlements along the European coast.
01:17But all those are just the oldest individual trees.
01:22Clonal colonies, groups of trees that share the same genetic material
01:27and are connected by a single root system, are far older.
01:31In Utah's Fish Lake National Forest,
01:33one group of 40,000 quaking aspen known as the pando,
01:37or trembling giant, is thought to be 80,000 years old.
01:42Earth's oldest trees.
01:45Just one of life's little mysteries.
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