PDN Photo of the Day

July 7, 2014

The Oldest Living Things in the World

This baobab lives in the Kruger Game Preserve in South Africa and requires an armed escort to visit. Baobabs get pulpy at their centers and tend to hollow out as they grow older. These hollows can serve as natural shelters for animals, but have also been appropriated for some less scrupulous human uses: for instance, as a toilet, a prison, and a bar. © Rachel Sussman/Courtesy University of Chicago Press
Straddling the biologic and the geologic, stromatolites are organisms that are tied to the oxygenation of the planet 3.5 billion years ago, and the beginnings of all life on Earth. © Rachel Sussman/Courtesy University of Chicago Press
Fire destroyed much of this clonal colony of Huon Pines on Mount Read, Tasmania, but a substantial portion of it survived. The age of the colony was discovered by carbon dating ancient pollen found at the bottom of a nearby lakebed, which was genetically matched to the living colony. © Rachel Sussman/Courtesy University of Chicago Press
The Welwistchia is primitive conifer living only in parts of coastal Namibia and Angola where moisture from the sea meets the desert. Despite appearances, it only has two single leaves, which it never sheds. National plant of Namibia. © Rachel Sussman/Courtesy University of Chicago Press
Bristlecone pines are the oldest unitary organisms in the world, known to surpass 5,000 years in age. In the 1960's a then-grad student cut down what would have been the oldest known tree in the world while retrieving a lost coring bit. A cross section of that tree was placed in a Nevada casino. © Rachel Sussman/Courtesy University of Chicago Press
The approximately 12,000-year-old creosote bush and Mojave yucca both have remarkable circular structures, pushing slowly outward from a central originating stem. New stems replace old ones, but they are all connected by the same clonal root structure. © Rachel Sussman/Courtesy University of Chicago Press
This 9,950-year-old tree is like a portrait of climate change. The mass of branches near the ground grew the same way for roughly 9,500 years, but the new, spindly trunk in the center is only 50 or so years old, caused by warming at the top of this mountain plateau in Western Sweden. © Rachel Sussman/Courtesy University of Chicago Press
This baobab lives in the Kruger Game Preserve in South Africa and requires an armed escort to visit. Baobabs get pulpy at their centers and tend to hollow out as they grow older. These hollows can serve as natural shelters for animals, but have also been appropriated for some less scrupulous human uses: for instance, as a toilet, a prison, and a bar. © Rachel Sussman/Courtesy University of Chicago Press
Straddling the biologic and the geologic, stromatolites are organisms that are tied to the oxygenation of the planet 3.5 billion years ago, and the beginnings of all life on Earth. © Rachel Sussman/Courtesy University of Chicago Press
Fire destroyed much of this clonal colony of Huon Pines on Mount Read, Tasmania, but a substantial portion of it survived. The age of the colony was discovered by carbon dating ancient pollen found at the bottom of a nearby lakebed, which was genetically matched to the living colony. © Rachel Sussman/Courtesy University of Chicago Press
The Welwistchia is primitive conifer living only in parts of coastal Namibia and Angola where moisture from the sea meets the desert. Despite appearances, it only has two single leaves, which it never sheds. National plant of Namibia. © Rachel Sussman/Courtesy University of Chicago Press
Bristlecone pines are the oldest unitary organisms in the world, known to surpass 5,000 years in age. In the 1960's a then-grad student cut down what would have been the oldest known tree in the world while retrieving a lost coring bit. A cross section of that tree was placed in a Nevada casino. © Rachel Sussman/Courtesy University of Chicago Press
The approximately 12,000-year-old creosote bush and Mojave yucca both have remarkable circular structures, pushing slowly outward from a central originating stem. New stems replace old ones, but they are all connected by the same clonal root structure. © Rachel Sussman/Courtesy University of Chicago Press
This 9,950-year-old tree is like a portrait of climate change. The mass of branches near the ground grew the same way for roughly 9,500 years, but the new, spindly trunk in the center is only 50 or so years old, caused by warming at the top of this mountain plateau in Western Sweden. © Rachel Sussman/Courtesy University of Chicago Press

The Oldest Living Things in the World is an epic journey through time and space. Over the past decade, artist Rachel Sussman has researched, worked with biologists and traveled the world to photograph continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older. Spanning from Antarctica to Greenland, the Mojave Desert to the Australian Outback, the result is a stunning and unique visual collection of ancient organisms unlike anything that has been created in the arts or sciences before, insightfully and accessibly narrated by Sussman along the way. Her portraits reveal the living history of our planet—and what we stand to lose in the future. – Courtesy University of Chicago Press

The Oldest Living Things in the World was published April 2014 and nearly sold out. A collector’s edition of 150 is now available for pre-order for $1,500. Each book is signed and numbered, and includes an archival print in a custom box. PDN wrote about Sussman’s fundraising efforts for her project in 2010. Read about it here.

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