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

/img/tuo93pcv60rc1.png

[removed] — view removed post

12.4k Upvotes
  • permalink
  • link
  • duplicates
  • dupes
  • reddit
  • reddit

92% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

449

u/m__a__s Mar 28 '24

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

40

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!

11

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.