These Are Some of the Oldest Living Things on Earth

Animals sometimes sleep inside the hollows of giant 2,000-year old baobab trees inside Kruger Game Preserve in South Africa. Humans too, sometimes use the trees, for more dubious purposes -- a jail, a toilet, a pop-up bar -- as photographer Rachel Sussman discovered when she toured the park to photograph the trees for her new book, The Oldest Living Things in the World.

Animals sometimes sleep inside the hollows of giant 2,000-year old baobab trees in South Africa. Humans too, sometimes use old trees, for more dubious purposes -- a jail, a toilet, a pop-up bar -- as photographer Rachel Sussman discovered when she toured the world to photograph ancient trees and other organisms for her new book, The Oldest Living Things in the World.

The very oldest living things on the planet, scientists believe, are Actinobacteria that have inhabited underground permafrost in Siberia for up to 600,000 years. But ancient life survives on every continent, from 5,500-year-old Antarctic mosses, to a 100,000-year-old Mediterranean sea grass meadow, to 12,000-year-old creosote bushes in the Mojave desert, to the Tasmanian lomatia, a 43,600-year-old tree so endangered that only a single individual exists.

The book includes a map to help place these ancient life forms, and a timeline to put them in cosmic, geologic, and anthropological perspective. Those Mediterranean sea grasses, for instance, were taking root just as our ancestors started spreading out from Africa.

Sussman traveled the world to photograph dozens of organisms, sometimes risking life and limb in the process. Her stories about getting lost in Greenland, breaking her wrist in Sri Lanka, and learning to scuba dive so she could visit ancient brain corals off Tobago make the book even more interesting.

The book is scattered with foreboding anecdotes of human impacts on these ancient organisms, many of them rare or even critically endangered. In South Africa, 13,000-year-old underground forests (populated by trees with most of their mass underground -- a defense against fire in this arid region) are being poisoned to make way for fields and new roads. In Florida, kids high on meth started a fire inside the hollow trunk of a 3,500 year old cypress tree that burned it down. Being old, Sussman reminds us, is not the same as being immortal.

*Correction: And earlier version of this post incorrectly identified the lomatia shrub as Tanzanian. It is Tasmanian. *