Barking after immortality

In the '60s a grad student asked, and received, permission to cut down a bristlecone tree in the mountains of California, because his coring tool broke and he wanted to know the age of the tree. He killed the oldest living thing on the planet. A tree nearly 5,000 years old. I'm sure the idiot got his PhD though.

A younger sibling of that tree lives still at an estimated 4,860 plus years of age. Methuselah it's been nicknamed, although as one researcher gloriously suggested, using Methuselah as a benchmark for "old" is ridiculous when talking about bristlecones.

No point to this blog, other than I am generally in awe of trees at the best of times and would find it a religious experience to be in the presence of a tree that is, certainly by human standards, an immortal thing, and that lives successfully so long precisely because its environment is so fundamentally harsh to any life whatsoever that predation of any sort is absent. [Luckily the location of the tree is generally a well kept secret lest another idiot grad student or souvenir hunter (or Toronto fag on a quest for spirituality by tree) find it and do it harm. Even the deadwood of bristlecones, which commonly can last a thousand years, is much wanted by bounty hunters.]