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High in California's White Mountains grows a bristlecone pine that was already a thousand years old when the Egyptians built the Great Pyramid. Named Methuselah, it has been alive for over 4,850 years — a single organism that has witnessed the entire span of recorded human civilization. And it may not even be the oldest: some trees cheat death by cloning themselves, producing organisms that have lived, in a sense, for tens of thousands of years.

A single fungus in Oregon occupies 965 hectares — larger than 1,300 football fields — and may be 8,650 years old. An aspen grove in Utah is technically one tree: 47,000 stems sharing a single root network weighing 6,000 metric tons. The blue whale, the largest animal ever to have lived on Earth, has a heart the size of a small car. When biologists argue about what the 'largest organism on Earth' is, they are really arguing about what counts as an individual — and that question has no single clean answer.