This is the place where you can see the oldest living things on Earth. Those who want to see the world might want to spend time with these 10 living ambassadors from the past, including a hen that has flown tens of millions of miles, a rose that survived an aerial bombing, a tree linked to Buddha, invertebrates in Antarctica, and green globules in the Andes.
This and other great paleo-pilgrimage destinations await the traveler who wants to see them.
70 years ago, Wild Bird:
Knowledge, the world’s oldest known hen in the wild, is at least 70 years old. In November, she came back to her winter home on Halfway Atoll for the second time in a row. It was banded in 1956, and since then, the Laysan albatross has flown more than three million miles. That’s six times as far as it takes to go to the moon and back.
As long as you keep going, you can see Knowledge and her Phoebastria immutabilis in their paradise in the Pacific Ocean. A place called Halfway Atoll is on the far north end of the Hawaiian archipelago, near the island of Maui.
About 190 years.
Jonathan isn’t sure how old he is, but he is thought to be about 187 years old.
Jonathan, the most popular person on St. Helena, a small island in the South Atlantic, was born in about 1832, five years before Queen Victoria was crowned. This huge tortoise has lived with 40 presidents of the United States since it first came to the country.
In 1821, Napoleon, the French emperor, died in exile on the island. He didn’t meet the other famous person who lived there, because Napoleon died in 1821. Because it was a gift for the governor of St. Helena in 1882, the reptilian giant came from the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean, but moved to the Atlantic Ocean as a gift.
It’s been a long time since he’s been roaming around the governor’s big island property, where he enjoys the company of other big tortoises and a lot of people.
About 1,200 years.
The Thousand-Year Rose is a huge rose bush in Germany that is thought to have been planted by King Louis the Pious in 815. It is celebrated because it has been around for so long.
The bush grows next to a Catholic cathedral in Hildesheim, which is a beautiful mediaeval town known for its old church buildings.
Besides being beautiful and old, the plant has a lot of strength. Allied bombing during World War II left the cathedral in ruins, but the rose, a Rosa canina, also known as the canine rose, somehow survived, thrived, and now grows more than 30 feet tall next to the apse of the restored church.
Visit at any time, but late May and early June are the best times to see the delicate pink blossoms, which are very delicate.
Planting a tree takes about 2,300 years.
In Sri Lanka, the sacred Bodhi tree at the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi Temple is called a “bodhi tree.”
Siddhartha Gautama was enlightened under a fig tree in India, but the tree is long gone. A piece of it, taken by a royal devotee to Sri Lanka around 250 BCE, give or take a few years, has grown into one of the most important trees in Buddhism and the oldest known tree with a recorded planting in history.
For hundreds of years, Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi, Ficus religiosa, has been a place for the religious, the curious, and the nefarious for hundreds of years.
H.G. Wells was amazed by it. In the end, the elephants broke it down. It was besieged by Tamil separatists.
On full moon days (poya), pilgrims of all kinds pay their respects to the tree. It stands in an elaborate garden with canals and golden fences, as well as religious shrines and young Bodhi trees in the Mahamevnawa Gardens in Sri Lanka.
Working Tree: About 2,500 years.
A seed sprouted on the Mediterranean island of Crete between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago, long before the rise of Classical Greece. Whether or not it was planted by man or nature, the seed has been producing olives every year ever since.
As for Vouves, a huge tree in the village isn’t just used to make drupe fruit. It and other Olea europaea that are similar in age and look draw artists, religious leaders, Olympians, and heads of state because of their gnarled trunks and limbs.
A museum that shows how olives are harvested in Crete opened next to the tree. Crete was once the home of the Minoan civilization, which thrived in the past because of its olive oil trade.
About 3,000 years.
This group of blobs is made up of Andean shrubs that have been around for a long time.
The Yareta, or llareta, bright green blobs that look like moss-covered boulders, are actually flowering shrubs that can withstand the high-altitude conditions of the Andes Mountains in Peru, Bolivia, northern Chile, and western Argentina, which are home to these plants.
Wild Azorella compacta is a relative of parsley and fennel that isn’t very tasty, but it has a hard time competing with wind, freezing temperatures, and drought because it grows slowly and methodically. It can grow up to one metre in a century.
Due to their slow growth rate, the oldest shrubs are thought to be about 3,000 years old.
It’s because they’re so dense that a shrub can simply help a person carry their own weight. Yaretan has been used as a standard for gasoline. As a good thing, governments in South America have banded together to protect the endangered species.
One tree, about 5,000 years.
Methuselah, a bristlecone pine in the White Mountains of California, is about 5,000 years old, making it the oldest known non-cloned living thing on Earth.
The Pinus longaeva is named after an Old Testament figure who lived for 969 years. The exact location of the tree is still a closely guarded scientific secret, but you can walk among its old friends and even the tree itself on a 4.5-mile trail through the Historic Bristlecone Pine Forest in the Inyo National Forest.
This grove of gnarled, knotted pines, many older than the Egyptian pyramids and clinging to arid mountains that jut out of the desert ground, makes no difference whether you find the oldest one or not. It makes no difference if you find the oldest one or not.
About 15,000 years ago,
Anoxycalyx joubini is the name of the vulcanian sponge in Antarctica.
In this case, Rob Robbins works for EarthRef.org, and he has a job.
Anoxycalyx joubini volcano sponges are white blobs that look like big beer barrels or small volcanoes. They live in the cold waters around McMurdo Sound, and their age is based on the size of the sponges, which only grow a little each year.
People say that they live in a place that is 50 to 500 feet below. They are sentinels of a deep world that they share with other unknown creatures, like tiny crustaceans that live inside sponges and wriggling little worms.
Only the most dedicated scuba divers can find this place. Because of high-ocean outfitters like Polar Trec, they can enjoy some of the best underwater visibility on the planet after they drill through the ice and get to the bottom.
About 80,000 years ago,
The Trembling Big of Utah is made up of almost 50,000 quaking aspen trees, but all of them are genetically the same and share a single root system, making them all one organism.
In Latin, the name of this clonal colony of a single male is Pando, which means “I spread out.” This is because it spreads out over more than 100 acres.
The leaves of one quaking aspen make a lot of noise, even when the wind isn’t very strong. As you spend a single day in Pando’s heart, you’ll hear the sound of hundreds of thousands of times. You’ll be camping in the Fishlake National Forest.
About 200,000 years ago, the sea forest was
Geneticists say that a seagrass meadow ten miles long near Spain is the oldest known single organism on Earth because it has been around for so long.
Posidonia oceanica, which is also known as Neptune’s grass, is found only in the Mediterranean Sea. However, a patch near the island of Formentera, which is self-cloned like Pando, stands out for its age, which is thought to be 200,000 years old.
The island, which is the smallest of Spain’s Balearic Islands, isn’t as crowded as Ibiza, which is close by. Taking a scuba or snorkelling trip to the traditional sea forest is also a good way to see the island’s lighthouse and caves, as well as the traditional sea forest.
One year after it came out in 2019, this store was up to date in February 2022.
