It’s a shame they had ot cut it down to count its rings! :-)
They did DNA sample comparisons and carbon-14 dating..................
That really happened here in the US - in the white mountains of Nevada there was a tree, affectionately dubbed WPN-114, they wanted to age. Often this is done by extracting thin cores, which doesn’t harm the tree, but on this occasion the precision drill bit broke, so rather than wait, they just lobbed it down in chunks. Bristlecone pine.