Mary Lou MeBroom, age 12, of Hartlend, Vlis., for her question:
What is the oldest living thing on earth?
Until recently everyone thought that General Sherman was the oldest living thing on earth. The General is a true, a giant sequoia in Sequoia National Park. California was proud to call him not only the oldest, but the largest of living things: But now the General has lost his title ‑ or part of it. Ile is still the largest living thing. But someone has found G tree oven older than the ancient redwood.
It is estimated that the proud General has seen some 3,600 summers. A few miles north, however, lives a group of trees who can call him junior. Whon the General was a sprouting cone at least one of those fellows was already 1,000 years old. This ancient tree is a bristlccone pine named Great‑granddad Pick back. He was discovered and dated in 197. 1lith other ancient trues he dwells in Inyo National Forest in the White Mountains of California.
The bristlecono pines have none of the grandeur or the beauty of the redwoods. They look like gnarled and withered dwarfs, old and weary. The twisted trunks are bare and bleached, polished by the winter's ice and the summers windblown dust. Here and there a branch lives, putting forth dark pine foliage and cones. The cones are studded with sharp little spikes which give the bristlecone pine its namo.
The redwoods are spoiled darlings of the moist coastal lowlands. Not so the bristleconos. They thrive on hardship. Their home is in the high Sierra, 10,000 feet above the sea level and the moist coastal mists. This region averages only ten inches of rainfall a year ‑ and even an arid desert averages five inches a year. Winters are bitterly cold and for a good part of the year the California bristlecones are frosted and iced.
Since they are pine trees, the bristlecones arc, rich in resin. This gummy material acts to preserve the wood from weather, fire and insects. What's more, the bristlecone is able to shut down operations altogether when times are bad. The tree rods slowly and, during hard seasons, it does not grow at all.
These Methuselah trees, as they are celled, grow at high levels from California into Colorndo. The oldest of them live where times are hardest, on the western slopes of the Sierra. These ancient trees ad.d no more than an inch of growth in a century.
Old Great‑granddaddy was a sprout whoa the Pyramids were new. A corer was used to cut out a thin strip of wood to the heart of his snarled old trunk. The number of tree rings in this sample showed ths:t this Methuselah had seen 600 years.
The pickaback trunk shows a series of generations. The first branch, great‑granddaddy, withered as a newer branch, granddaddy, took over. Granddaddy withered and daddy took over.
The branch living now is Junior, a mere 1,200 years old. Junior wears a coat of bark covered with foliage and cones. He supports the ancient branches, now welded together in a twisted trunk. So far as we know this greet‑granddad pine tree is the oldest living thing upon the earth.