Since we're talking trees. Only trees that grow in an area with distinct warm/cold cycles have rings, tropical trees don't and the only way to tell the age of most tropical trees is to have planted it yourself
Wouldn’t a tree without rings still reasonably capture the atmospheric C13:C12 ratio as it grows? Or is the carbon motility within the trunk too high, or the ratio differences too small, to sample a bit near the core and use the ratio there as an age indicator?
I would say the Eucalyptus tree, planted all over the world but native to Australia, is quite unusual.
Young Eucalyptus trees have leaves that are rounded and are arranged opposite to one another. However, when mature the leaves of a Eucalyptus are lance-like and are arranged in an alternating fashion. This to me is quite unusual.
It's funny, a neighbor had me cut their eucalyptus down, then it grew back from the stump and I had to cut it again a couple years later. Then I has to cut it again a few years after that. Now it looks like I'm going to have to cut it again soon. It's become a running joke at this point.
Those things are tough, and they grow really fast in the right climate.
True. Although in their native Australia they grew quite straight. It's the introduced trees that grow not so straight and make bad railroad ties.
In areas where they are introduced, they also become quite invasive by practicing something called alelopathy, whereby they introduce toxins into the soil to prevent competing tree species from taking hold.
While I'm at it, Eucalyptus trees have very very dense wood which means the wood burns very hot. This makes it even worse for forest fires where Eucalyptus trees dominate.
(I knew my botany studies would come in handy someday. I just never knew when!)
There is something fascinating about someone getting a copy of Encyclopedia Brititanica, reading about trees, and then going to Wikipedia for pictures and to fill out details.
"Fish" is almost a good category, you only need to nuke a unusual branch and call it a day.
A better comparison is "Fliyers", that include most insects, most birds, bats, pterodactyls and perhaps a few gliding and kitting animals. It evolveded and disappeared a few times.
Thank you! Isn’t it amazing how a rigid hierarchical categorization system fails everywhere you actually look into details?
See also category theory vs prototype theory.
It's amazing that most people don't realize it, and even in higher education you get people believing in taxonomies and categories as if they were a property of the natural world. There are no categories in the objective reality, rigid or otherwise; there are no metadata tags attached to elementary particles, that say what the arrangement they're part of is, and of what type it is. Whether in biology or in code, taxonomies are arbitrary - they're created by people for some specific purpose, and judged by useful they are in serving that purpose.
You'd think that now that we have LLMs, the actual in-your-face empirical evidence of a system that can effectively navigate the complexities of the real world without being fed, or internally developing, rigid ontologies, that people would finally get the memo - but alas.
Indeed, one of the epistemological lessons for me when confronting the power of LLMs is that a sort of "intellectual capability" can emerge in any system, from sheer scale/complexity alone.
The UK has quite a few ancient yew trees. Some may be over 2000 years old. Often they are in church grounds (because ones that weren't got cut down to make long bows perhaps?).
One of the many nice things about nature is that almost everything is interesting and unique in some particular way, be it longevity, size, or far more specific traits, across all species, all domains of natural science.
This is (was?) the advantage of a printed encyclopedia - one that I've never really been able to replicate scrolling wikipedia. I think it has more to do with the limitations and lack of linking than lack of information (each of these trees has a wikipedia article).
A wikipedia dive session is likely to get more and more specific into trees (attacked by twees!); an encyclopedia flip session is more likely to go across a wide variety of subjects.
A while back I read this book "The Secret Life of Trees: How They Live and Why They Matter" from Colin Tudge and I was blown away by the fact that Mangrove roots effectively breath with the rhythm of tide. As the water recedes, change in pressure and the air is drawn into the pores. As the water comes in, pressure pushes stale air out and seals the pores. Trees are beautiful.
I like to imagine aliens visiting earth and walking straight past us and communing with Pando.
> Recent 2024 analysis confirmed it is at least 16,000 years old, with possibilities ranging up to 80,000 years, making it one of the oldest living organisms.
The trees are not unusual at all for the people living in tropical climates. Fun trees Yes but unusual no. Most people of the world live in tropical climates so for most these are not unusual
Pushing back against the subtle suggestion that only American and European viewpoints are normal is more an example of cleaning up shit than shitting on anybody.
Young Eucalyptus trees have leaves that are rounded and are arranged opposite to one another. However, when mature the leaves of a Eucalyptus are lance-like and are arranged in an alternating fashion. This to me is quite unusual.
Those things are tough, and they grow really fast in the right climate.
had*
@dang, I wish we had more time to edit our posts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpH9gBsNEwI
In areas where they are introduced, they also become quite invasive by practicing something called alelopathy, whereby they introduce toxins into the soil to prevent competing tree species from taking hold.
While I'm at it, Eucalyptus trees have very very dense wood which means the wood burns very hot. This makes it even worse for forest fires where Eucalyptus trees dominate.
(I knew my botany studies would come in handy someday. I just never knew when!)
https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...
A better comparison is "Fliyers", that include most insects, most birds, bats, pterodactyls and perhaps a few gliding and kitting animals. It evolveded and disappeared a few times.
You'd think that now that we have LLMs, the actual in-your-face empirical evidence of a system that can effectively navigate the complexities of the real world without being fed, or internally developing, rigid ontologies, that people would finally get the memo - but alas.
If you're interested, check out Rupert Sheldrake:
https://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/Is_the_Sun_Consc...
Two examples right from downtown São Paulo,
https://kenschutte.com/lima-to-rio-by-bus/images/trees.jpg
https://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2017/12/12/the-travel...
https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/blog/2025/08/ancient-yew-tr...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSch_NgZpQs
A wikipedia dive session is likely to get more and more specific into trees (attacked by twees!); an encyclopedia flip session is more likely to go across a wide variety of subjects.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
[0]https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platano_di_Vrisi
> Recent 2024 analysis confirmed it is at least 16,000 years old, with possibilities ranging up to 80,000 years, making it one of the oldest living organisms.