LAS VEGAS - A nonprofit group has snipped some cuttings to clone what is believed to be the world's oldest tree, a bristlecone pine they say has grown for 4,767 years on a wind-swept mountain in eastern California.

With the guidance of a U.S. Forest Service ranger, representatives from Michigan-based Champion Tree Project International hiked Tuesday to the tree, at an elevation of 10,400 feet in the White Mountains on the California-Nevada border.

“It has lived at least a millennium longer than any other known tree,” Forest Service official Larry Payne said Wednesday from Washington, D.C.

The tree was dubbed Methuselah after scientist Edmund Schulman found it and age-dated it by a core sample in the 1950s. Although the name is biblical, the tree is believed to predate Christ by almost 3,000 years.

“It's healthy,” said David Milarch, co-founder with his son of the project. “It's gnarly from almost 5,000 years of harsh weather. But they got plenty of good material.”

Mr. Milarch's son, Jared, and organization director Terry Mock traveled six hours from Las Vegas to reach the tree. A flat tire while returning cost the group a chance to send the specimens - wrapped in towels and packed in ice - by commercial overnight shipping to the University of California, Davis.

An Associated Press photographer from San Francisco who documented the expedition delivered the cooler with six 4-inch cuttings, some needle bundles and pine cone seed pods to Bill Werner, a project associate, at a crossroads in Manteca, Calif.

Mr. Werner delivered the specimens to Chris Friel, a doctoral student in plant pathology at UC Davis who is trying to clone the tree.

“Within a year, either I'll have an itty bitty little tree or I won't,” Mr. Friel said. “Frankly, the chances on an ancient tree are extremely slim.”

David Milarch said the Methuselah tree stands about 55 feet tall, with a misshapen oval-shaped trunk measuring 4 1/2 feet wide.

Jared Milarch and Mr. Mock also took samples for cloning from a bristlecone pine believed to be the largest of the species and growing in the same forest - a 60-foot tall tree known as “the Patriarch.”

Richard Harris, a forestry specialist at the University of California, Berkeley, said it was possible the Methuselah tree was the oldest in the world.

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