Donald Rusk Currey

Donald Rusk Currey (January 24, 1934 – June 6, 2004) was an American professor of geography. While known in academia for his extensive research and exploration of relics of the ancient Lake Bonneville in the eastern Great Basin, he was best known to the public for his controversial felling of Prometheus, the oldest living non-clonal organism known at the time, while a graduate student in 1964.

In 1963, Currey was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Under a fellowship from the National Science Foundation, Currey was studying the climate dynamics of the Little Ice Age using dendrochronology techniques.

Bristlecone pines in the White Mountains of California and elsewhere were discovered to be older than any species yet dated, and in 1963 Currey became aware of a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine population in the Snake Range and on Wheeler Peak in particular. At the time he visited the area, in the summer of 1964, he did not know that previous researchers had examined the area. Based on the size, growth rate and growth forms of some of the trees he became convinced that some very old specimens existed on the mountain and, using the scientific methods of the time, Currey began taking core samples to check. He found that some exceeded 3000 years in age, taking particular interest in a tree he designated WPN-114, the previously named Prometheus.

Currey was unable to obtain a continuous series of overlapping cores from WPN-114: he had tried at least four times with a 28 inch long borer, breaking two borers, but to no avail. He decided to ask for permission from the United States Forest Service to fell the tree. He was already acquainted with Forest Service officials at the nearby Lehman Caves National Monument (now a part of the much larger Great Basin National Park which includes the area Currey was working in), and made a request with Donald E. Cox, a district Forest Service ranger for permission to cut down the tree in order to examine the whole trunk in cross-section. Cox felt that the request was scientifically sound and, after convincing superiors that the particular tree was not a notable landmark, gained approval for felling it.

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