A quaking-aspen grove nicknamed “Pando” (Latin for “I spread”) in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest is considered to be the oldest clonal organism in America; the individual trees live only to the age of 120 or so, but they share a root system that supposedly has been expanding for 80,000 years. It’s also possible that deep within some foreign cave, there’s a plucky little million-year-old microbe that has escaped notice all these years. But for all intents and purposes, when it comes to the oldest single living organism in the United States, Prometheus was the champ. (Methuselah, a
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