Some of the Oldest Living Things in the World

Spanning from Antarctica to Greenland, the Mojave Desert to the Australian Outback, the result is a stunning visual collection of ancient organisms for a book entitled, The Oldest Living Things in the World.

For the last 10 years, artist Rachel Sussman has researched, worked with biologists, and travelled the world to photograph continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older.

Sussman’s book spans disciplines, continents, and millennia; underscored by an innate environmentalism and driven by her relentless curiosity. These ancient individuals live on every continent and range from Greenlandic lichens that grow only one centimeter a century, to unique desert shrubs in Africa and South America, a predatory fungus in Oregon, Caribbean brain coral, to an 80,000-year-old colony of aspen in Utah.