There are a lot of unusual record holders, but the world’s fattest woman‘s got nothing on Pando. Pando, also called The Quaking Giant, is quite possibly both the largest and the oldest living organism in the world. It’s a copse of Quaking Aspen trees located in Fish Lake, Utah’s Fishlake National Park. No, I don’t know why they spell it differently.
Pando is estimated to be over 80,000 years old (but could be as old as a million years old). The tree is over 105 acres in size, thanks to a monster root section, and the combined colony is a massive 6,615 tons of tree. While some debate has sprung up over Pando’s actual age, and whether or not you can count the whole of Pando as a living organism, there’s no debate that the tree is at least 10,000 years old, simply due to the fact that aspen can’t grow in Utah since the end of the last ice age.
Tags: 80000-year-old organism, the world’s oldest organism, the world’s oldest living thing, Pando, the world’s oldest tree, ancient trees, heaviest organism on earth, 6615 tons, giant plants, Quaking Aspen, Fishlake National Park, Fish Lake, Utah, The Trembling Giant
