Happy 500,000th Birthday to This Siberian Bacteria

Mother Jones has a nice interview up with photographer Rachel Sussman, who has been traveling the world and taking pictures of the oldest things she can find: 2,000-year-old brain coral, an 80,000-year-old colony of trees. Says Sussman:

One thing that is really interesting is that there is no area that deals with longevity across species. For example, dendrochronologists study tree history, and mycologists study fungi. But they don’t talk to each other. So there was no list of old organisms. Apart from a lot of Google searches, I would try to find the published scientific research. It might start out with a rumor in a local newspaper — “hey, here is this 100,000-year-old sea grass” — and I then track down some hard facts and contact the researchers, who nine out of 10 times, are so thrilled that someone is interested in their esoteric work.

To the right is the oldest thing she photographed, a lab sample of bacteria that could actually be anywhere between 400,000 and 600,000 years old. Can you imagine an age at which a 200,000-year discrepancy doesn’t mean that much? That bacteria is sitting around in the permafrost with its friends all like, “In my day, humans weren’t on their goddamn phones all the time because they had the social cognition of a contemporary border collie and lived till age 35.” [Mother Jones]