Bristlecone pine no longer oldest tree

BrianBay9

Swedish spruce now takes "the oldest" honor, by several thousand years.....

http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...80416104320.htm

Brian

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Mcspeed

That will make Emil smile.

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BunjinEnt

http://forum.bonsaitalk.com/f14/wor...tree-28419.html

http://forum.bonsaitalk.com/f14/old-trees-14591.html

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BrianBay9

Sorry. Apparently scooped and didn't realize it.

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baldguy

This is an error, horticulturally speaking. If I nurtured a sprout that appeared on a root, then the parent tree died, and I counted the rings of the parent tree, I could not say that my sprout WAS the parent tree, and therefore was the parent tree's age- it is a new shoot!

Nevertheless, it would be of the same genetic material and share the same DNA.

What they have is probably the offspring of many generations of reproduction by shoot production from roots. Can you claim that a tree grown from a root cutting is the parent tree, and therefore shares the parent tree's age?

Wish I knew the Swedish word for bologna.

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Vance Wood

This is a point of view I personally agree with. Using the above way of thinking you could once more return to the Coast Red Woods which incidentally reproduce mostly by suckers off of a basal burl. This would, using the above method, make some of these Red Woods 25,000 years old or older depending on how far back the original base formed. In my opinion the age of a tree must be determined by how old the growing tree is above ground, not how old the stump or burl that spawned it.

However using this method, if it is argued and proven that the stump, base etc. is the true age, then my Larch is somewhere around five to six hundred years old.

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Mindcrime

I leave the process of deciding which tree is the oldest to the scientist, but the Swedish word for BS is "Skitsnack" (pronounced Schít-snack where the letter a is pronounced the the o in "oven")

Regards
Emil, your personal Swedish teacher

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Mcspeed

Ah whats a couple thousand years amongst trees .

Skitsnack , you never know when that will be handy.

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AMKhalid

Technically it is the oldest age definitively determined for any part of a tree (i.e. oldest root system). Bristlecones have the oldest "trunk".

There are probably lots of trees older than this spruce when the literal definition is used, but the problem is dating them. This one was convenient enough to be collecting a pile of litter which could be carbon dated and genotyped.

The quaking aspen stands, for example, which are vast forests of just clones (suckers) - the parent line is estimated to be hundreds of thousands of years old. But there is no way to prove it because none of the original material is available.