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Comment by rifleman44 | Hacker News Reader

How old is that tree?

Not sure, but by the way, Great Basin National Park has some of the oldest trees in the world, bristlecomb pines. They are used to study past climates through dendrochronology. If you ever get a chance to go to GBNP, do. It is completely beautiful and the "sky island" ecology is not one you would expect to find in the middle of the Nevada desert.

@rifleman44 ha! I was thinking the same thing. The tree looks like it has a small trunk. I was thinking there can't be 100 rings and if there were, it would be the whole tree.

I'm Mr. Skeptical... It's hard to believe with the tree growth and over a hundred years of weather that the gun stayed propped up like that. It does look a little wedged between two trunks but wow...

Trees grow from the top.

The park service helps narrow down what sort of Juniper it is likely to be:

http://www.nps.gov/grba/naturescience/treesandshrubs.htm

One of those species is famously long lived (and slow growing):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juniperus_scopulorum

Reaching ~5-6 meters and living hundreds of years.

I guess the other is similar, though no mention of ages in the wiki article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juniperus_osteosperma

Don't trees grow very slowly in arid areas like that?

The gun could also have been laying down at one point then raised slowly as the tree grew.

Trees grow from the top - from the very tip of the branches. The trunk never moves up, the gun would not raise as the tree grew.

(Grass grows from the bottom, that's why animals can eat it without harming it.)

The third oldest living organism ever documented was a Bristlecone Pine dubbed "Prometheus" in Great Basin National Park (the same park as the story).

It was at least 4862 years old before being cut down for study!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prometheus_%28tree%29

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