Photos of the World’s Oldest Living Things
Among the organisms documented by photographer Rachel Sussman are 80,000-year-old aspen trees and 600,000-year-old bacteria

Stromatolites
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Sussman has now photographed more than 30 ancient organisms as part of her Oldest Living Things in the World project; she will publish a book of her work in the spring of 2014. She traveled to Western Australia to photograph these stromatolites, layered structures built by microorganisms in shallow water, which are roughly 2,000-3,000 years old.
Beech
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Llareta
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“Some of them have obvious physical grandeur,” she says of her ancient organisms, “whereas others are so diminutive that it’s only by taking into consideration their place in an extended timescale that their profundity starts to take hold.”
Antarctic Moss
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The oldest organism Sussman has photographed is a bacteria sample from the Siberian permafrost (not pictured) that has survived for 400,000 to 600,000 years. But the permafrost is thawing as the climate changes, so the world’s longest known survivor, she says, “may also be the most vulnerable.”
Welwitschia
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“One commonality between these organisms is their tendency to live in some of the most extreme environments on Earth—deserts, polar regions and places of high altitudes or low nutrient availability,” Sussman says. “They tend grow slowly, as opposed to fast and furious.”
Aspens
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Baobab
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“One of my challenges was, ironically, lack of time,” Sussman says. “For certain of my subjects I only had an hour, or sometimes even a matter of minutes, to spend with them. I couldn’t always wait for the weather or light to change even if I didn’t like what I was seeing.”