In this gee-whiz science and great outdoors piece, an expert in tree-ring research shares some of the details of what trees can tell us — and whether or not their rings can reveal their age.

Researchers can count the number of rings in samples of wood extracted from living specimens and precisely determine a tree’s age. That practice has spawned an entire subfield of scientific ...

Dendrochronology—the art of tree-ring counting—allows us to precisely date trees. Based on the rings in its trunk, a bristlecone pine in eastern California known as Methuselah is said to be ...

Counting tree rings for age isn’t entirely accurate, Gore said. But he estimated the tree that stood there just hours earlier on Monday was around 100 years old.

Like a tree, clams can be aged by counting the annual growth rings in their shells. Though researchers initially thought Ming was just over 400 years old, ... like counting tree rings.

After carefully counting each ring of the tree, paleobotanist Scott Wing determined that the tree lived for 260 years, although he admits that may not be exactly correct.

The previous record-setting alerce was identified in the early 1990s by counting tree rings on a cut stump; it was more than 3,600 years old. (The oldest known giant sequoia, ...

You may be familiar with counting tree rings to see how old a tree is, but the thickness of tree rings and other patterns in the wood, like fire scars, can reveal how quickly a tree has grown and ...

If you cut down a tree, you can read in the wood an environmental record. Now climate change is complicating the narrative. In a basement in Tucson, Ariz., slices of tree trunks stand on shelves ...

Dendrochronologists count these rings and can assign a ring to a specific year. This helps them determine a tree's age and make observations about the environment they live in each year.

Counting up the rings shows the tree’s age. Thicker rings might indicate a warmer year in trees that time their growing seasons with changes in temperature.