Since ancient times, trees have delighted people with their durability. In comparison with a short human life, the age of a tree seemed almost immortality: a person who has lived at least a hundred years is a unique phenomenon, for a tree, however, an age calculated in centuries is considered the norm.
Long-lived trees have always had a special attitude. It would never occur to anyone to cut down such a “forest patriarch” for firewood or to build a house. In the modern world, ancient trees are also respected and cherished.
Long-lived trees
One of the oldest trees on earth is the oak tree growing in the Swedish Jagerspies forest. Scientists have not been able to accurately determine its age, but it is no more than 2,000 and no less than 1,500 years. The 2,000-year-old cowrie tree grows in New Zealand in the Waipaua forest, its girth is 16 m.
A yew tree can live for a very long time, because new shoots continue to grow on this tree when the main trunk dies off. The oldest yew grows in Wales in the city of Llangernew. Some researchers estimate its age at 3,000 years, others even at 4,000.
There is no consensus among scientists about the age of Japanese cryptomeria, growing on Yakushima Island in Japan, on the highest mountain. Some researchers believe that the tree is 7,000, others - that only 2,000.
4,000-year-old cypress grows in Abarkukh (Iran), and in California, in a park called Bristlekon Forest of the Ancients, there is a grove of long-lived pines. The youngest tree is at least 1,000 years old, and the oldest is 4,723 years old. This tree is called Methuselah - in honor of the biblical long-lived hero.
The oldest trees
If we talk not about specific trees, but about the most ancient type of tree that exists at the present time, then the palm should be awarded to gingko biloba. This plant is called a "living fossil" and even a "dinosaur tree", because it appeared on Earth about 200 million years ago - in the Mesozoic period, during the era of the domination of dinosaurs. Ginkgo biloba grows in China, Korea and Japan. The Chinese consider this tree to be sacred, and Japanese boys and girls have long used its leaves for fortune telling.
And yet gingko biloba and its "relatives" are not the very first trees to appear on Earth, from those "pioneers" they have not survived to this day for one species.
The very first trees appeared on the planet even before the emergence of dinosaurs - at the end of the Devonian period, about 360-365 million years ago. The remains of such a plant were first found in 1894 in the south of Donbass, and described by the Russian paleobotanist I. F. Schmalhausen. The oldest tree was named Archeopteris, which means "ancient fern", because its leaves, the type of which is known from the prints, resembled this plant. Researchers were not even immediately able to understand that leaf prints and petrified wood belong to the same plant.
