SAN FRANCISCO: US scientists and foresters want to clone what is believed to be one of the world’s oldest trees.

Toward that end, they are collecting needles, limbs and seed- bearing pine cones from the tree, a bristle-cone pine believed to be more than 4,700 years old. It stands in the White Mountains on the east slope of the Sierra Nevada range.

Botanists from the Champion Tree Project (http://www.championtreeproject.org), which has cloned 70 of the oldest and largest North American trees during the last five years, took the samples under supervision of forestry officials. The cloning work will take place in laboratories at a University of California campus in the city of Davis, northeast of San Francisco.

US Forest Service official John Louth said that the tree is dated at 4,767 years old, based on ring counts from core samples, a method usually accurate within a range of just a few years.

About 20 Methuselahs, as the bristle-cone forest’s most ancient denizens are called — named for an Old Testament character — are more than 4,000 years old. The gnarled pines can reach a height of 10 metres and are found only Western American mountains, growing near the treeline at altitudes of 2,000 to 4,300 metres.

The species’ longevity is likely a result of their very slow rate of growth, said Louth. The trees are “barely alive” and grow only for 45 days a year in the harsh climate of their high-altitude niche.

As plants age, laboratory reproduction becomes more difficult, said Champion Tree Project founder David Milarch. Yet he believes the cloning effort can succeed even on the oldest of the Methuselahs, despite the skepticism of other botanists and geneticists.

Milarch cites his group’s record of success in cloning more than 70 “champion trees”, including a 462-year-old oak from the East Coast state of Maryland.

The laboratory scientists hope that cuttings from the tree will send out shoots, that seeds from the pine cones will sprout and that cell cultures will grow. The process could yield further insights into the bristle-cone pine’s unequalled lifespan.

Milarch’s stated goal is to assemble a “living archive” of trees to preserve the species for future generations.

In the 1960s, forestry officials permitted the previously oldest tree to be felled for research purposes. Tree-ring dating methods placed it at 4,844 years old, but botanists believe the true age was more than 5,000 years.—dpa