Book Review: The Oldest Living Things in the World
Books and recommendations from Scientific American
By Clara Moskowitz
The Oldest Living Things in the World
by Rachel Sussman
University of Chicago Press, 2014
A colony of 80,000-year-old aspen trees in Utah, 400,000-year-old bacteria living in the Siberian permafrost and a shrub that has been self-propagating in Tasmania for 43,000 years are among the millennia-old organisms that photographer and writer Sussman traveled to seven continents to see. Her oversize book includes photographs, travel stories and interviews with scientists who study these impressive organisms.
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