"Methuselah" Tree Grew From 2,000-Year-Old SeedThere are photos too.
Anne Minard
for National Geographic News
June 12, 2008
The oldest-sprouted seed in the world is a 2,000-year-old plant from Jerusalem, a new study confirms.
"Methuselah," a 4-foot-tall (1.2-meter-tall) ancestor of the modern date palm, is being grown at a protected laboratory in the Israeli capital.
Because a witness to the long-ago siege recorded the Jews' plight and eventual mass suicide, locations of their food stores—which the Jews left behind to show they didn't starve to death—were well documented.
So the exact age of the seed isn't a big surprise, said project leader Sarah Sallon of the Hadassah Medical Organization in Jerusalem, but: "I was surprised that we were able to grow it."
Methuselah beats out the previous oldest-seed record holder, a lotus tree grown from a 1,300-year-old seed in 1995 by Jane Shen-Miller, a botanist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues.
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I've noted the progress of "Methuselah" frequently in the last few years. The first announcement was here.