The Oldest Living Things in the World

Takes you on a journey through time and space. The author begins at "year zero," and looks back from there, photographing the past in the present. Alongside the photographs, she combines tales of her worldly adventures tracking down these subjects with informative insight from the scientists who are studying them and their environments.

Sussman travelled the world to capture the oldest living things in the world, some of them the last of their kind, from a predatory fungus in Oregon, to Caribbean brain coral, to an 80,000-year-old colony of aspen in Utah. Sussman journeyed to Antarctica to photograph 5,500-year-old moss; Australia for stromatolites, primeval organisms tied to the oxygenation of the planet and the beginnings of life on Earth; and to Tasmania to capture a 43,600-year-old self-propagating shrub that's the last individual of its kind. Her portraits reveal the living history of our planet - and what we stand to lose in the future.