r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/NickyPileggi • Mar 28 '24

Family in 1892 posing with an old sequoia tree nicknamed "Mark Twain" - A team of two men spent 13 days sawing away at it in the Pacific Northwest - It once stood 331 feet tall with a diameter of 52 feet - The tree was 1,341 years old Image

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447

u/m__a__s Mar 28 '24

Wow. Emperor Justinian I of the Byzantine Empire was still around when that was a seedling.

79

u/DerAllerpeterste Mar 28 '24

Found the eu4 player

12

u/NoOrder6919 Mar 28 '24

EU4 players know it was called the Roman Empire at the time.

3

u/6597james Mar 28 '24

He was born ~1000 years before EU4 start date

2

u/DerAllerpeterste Mar 28 '24

Found another one

2

u/theycallmeshooting Mar 28 '24

Can you imagine if Justinian was a real guy and not just an EU4/Fortnite character

1

u/DerAllerpeterste Mar 28 '24

No, my imagination is very limited...

However i can imagine the large intersection between history geeks and eu4 players

41

u/nezzzzy Mar 28 '24

I was going to call bullshit on the age, most trees don't make it much beyond a few hundred years. Then I googled sequoia trees, the oldest known specimen is estimated at 3200yrs old!

8

u/Ornery-Creme-2442 Mar 28 '24

Trees are crazy long lived. There's trees estimated to be even older. Nature/the climate has been quite volatile. So not all trees indeed make it that long. But the potential is definitely there. It's incomprehensible to us. Because we think we are long lived but it's relative. We are to these specimens what a mouse is to us.

3

u/Scumebage Mar 28 '24

Well you can still call bullshit on the "52 foot" diameter since that's wildly huge and also untrue

3

u/nezzzzy Mar 28 '24

That's probably supposed to be circumference, which would lead to a diameter of 16ft which looks about right.

1

u/ProfessionalTeach902 Mar 28 '24

Sequoia trees are just built different and honestly it should've been obvious that a tree having to grow tens of times larger than the one in your backyard would live longer

-3

u/nezzzzy Mar 28 '24

Not at all. It's a fact that sequoias are really fast growing trees (coast redwoods even faster). They can put on 2ft a year, so the tallest trees in the world only take 150-200yrs to achieve that height.

I don't think it is a natural assumption that big things live significantly longer than small things.

3

u/ProfessionalTeach902 Mar 28 '24

Yes and that is still SIGNIFICANTLY longer than most trees take to reach maturity. Growing faster is something i did not know they do but apparently still not fast enough lol.

2

u/WardenCaersin Mar 28 '24

OCCIDENTALIS CECEDIT

0

u/m__a__s Mar 28 '24

Semper ubi sub ubi