This Is the Oldest Tree in Europe

This tree is not dead, despite appearances. It's alive and happy, and it's been clinging to this cliff in southern Italy since the eighth century A.D. Researchers invented a new dating method to figure out that the pine is the oldest known tree in Europe. Gianluca Piovesan of Università della Tuscia in Italy and colleagues spent three years taking samples from trees to try to find some really old ones. On mountain cliffs within Pollino National Park, they found a few trees that seemed to be a thousand years old or more. The most elderly individual they discovered was a conifer called a Heldreich's pine; the researchers nicknamed it Italus. Italus's spiky, dead top part and the patchy green growth in its midsection are typical of very old conifers, the scientists write. Also typical is its hollow trunk, decayed with age. That makes it impossible to use a core sample ...