The oldest were on the order of 1,000 years, and one Amazon Methuselah hit 1,400.

While there are older trees on Earth ?EUR??,,????'??+ California redwoods might live 2,000 years or more ?EUR??,,????'??+ the revelation of ancient trees in the Amazon is likely to add to the worries of climate scientists, said Susan Trumbore, a UC Irvine earth system science professor who wrote the study along with Brazilian colleagues.

It means many climate models designed to calculate how fast the planet is warming up might be wrong.

The main culprit in global warming is carbon dioxide gas, a major byproduct of industrial civilization. It is believed to trap heat in Earth’s atmosphere. One of the ways to slow down global warming is to bind up carbon dioxide in the bodies of trees and other vegetation, climate scientists say. If the Amazon trees grew quickly ?EUR??,,????'??+ as most experts thought ?EUR??,,????'??+ they could be relied upon to absorb carbon dioxide, slowing the rate of warming. But large, old trees are not as good at sequestering carbon dioxide. “The potential for those forests to take up (carbon dioxide) has been overestimated,” Trumbore said.

Tropical trees do not have easily identifiable tree rings, so until recently statements about their age were mostly guesswork.

“Nobody believed us,” she said of the tiny, nearly 800-year-old tree. “We didn’t believe it either. We measured it seven or eight times.”

Brazil nut trees, one of the few species widely recognized, ranged from 800 to 1,000 years old. The research was done not only to learn more about global warming but also to help conservationists in the Amazon determine which trees to harvest.