A Good Kind of Cloning
Here’s a cloning project that everyone will agree should be done: a nonprofit group plans to clone the world’s oldest tree, a 55 foot tall bristlecone pine that?s 4,767 years old and clings to a wind-swept mountain in eastern California. “It has lived at least a millennium longer than any other known tree,” says Forest Service official Larry Payne. The tree, named “Methuselah,” predates Christ by almost 3,000 years.
Edmund Schulman discovered the tree and dated it with by a core sample in the 1950s. However, boring provides only an age estimate, because it?s difficult to count 4,767 tree rings in a core sample from a twisted bristlecone trunk that?s 4 ? feet across. “The only way to determine the exact age is to cut it down,” Payne says.
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