A team of scientists spent three years looking for aged trees to study, and Pollino National Park, where Italus lives, has many examples of trees that have lived for hundreds of years. When they saw Italus, they knew this tree was remarkable. Dating Italus was tricky. Inside the tree, much of its core wood has disintegrated, which made it impossible to using tree ring dating techniques. Instead, they relied on a combination of techniques, including examining the tree’s root wood and using radiocarbon dating, to come up with a date when the roots would have formed: the year 789. 

That makes Italus the oldest scientifically dated tree in Europe. There are other trees that could be older but that scientists haven’t examined with such care. There are also clonal trees—most notably Old Tjikko, in Sweden—that have a longer history. The root system beneath Old Tjikko’s trunk has been around for close to 10,000 years, but the trunk that’s growing now is only few hundred years old.