The Ancient Clone
In an unassuming patch of the Mojave Desert, a sprawling ring of shrubs shows a long biological history. King Clone is a single organism of the creosote bush, Larrea tridentata. Every stem within this massive circle is genetically identical, having descended from one ancestral plant that took root as the last Ice Age ended. The colony measures an average of 45 feet (14 meters) in diameter, with its widest point reaching 67 feet (20 meters).
The organism's longevity is a result of its unique growth process. A creosote bush can reproduce vegetatively through a process called clonal fragmentation. As the plant ages, its crown splits, and new stems emerge from the periphery of its root system. Over thousands of years, the oldest central stems die off, leaving a void where the original plant once stood. The outward growth continues, slowly expanding the ring. This growth is exceptionally slow; when naturalist David Attenborough revisited the site in 2022, 40 years after his first visit, the ring had grown by less than an inch. This gradual expansion allows the single genetic individual to persist for millennia, far beyond the lifespan of any single stem.
Reading the Rings of Time
The age of King Clone was determined in the 1970s by a team led by Dr. Frank Vasek, a botanist from the University of California, Riverside. The investigation started after researchers noticed an unusually large and symmetrical creosote ring on aerial photographs. Vasek and his graduate student, Leonel Sternberg, confirmed that the stems within the ring were genetically identical, proving it was a single clonal colony.
To calculate the colony's age, the scientists employed two different methods. First, they measured the annual growth rate of creosote bushes and applied it to the diameter of the King Clone ring. Second, they used radiocarbon dating on dead wood fragments recovered from the barren center of the ring. Both methods yielded a consistent estimate: approximately 11,700 years old. This places the germination of the original plant at the boundary between the Pleistocene and Holocene epochs, making it one of the first organisms to colonize the Mojave after the glaciers receded.