Scientists have confirmed that—a massive forest of quaking aspen trees in Utah known as Pando—is between 16,000 and 80,000 years old, solidifying its place among the planet’s most ancient organisms. The forest, whose Latin name means “I spread,” is a single living thing: one tree that has cloned itself tens of thousands of times. Spanning 42.6 hectares of Utah’s Fishlake National Forest, Pando consists of approximately 47,000 individual stems all connected by a single, vast root system. “Pando looks like a normal forest,” said William Ratcliff, an evolutionary biologist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and co-author of the study. “But while the trees last only about 200 years, they continually regenerate from the root system, which kind of lives forever.” Pando has unique genetic makeup. The tree is triploid, meaning its cells contain three copies of each chromosome instead of the usual two.