Posted on 02/21/2012 12:42:13 PM PST by Free ThinkerNY
Fruits in my fruit bowl tend to rot into a mulchy mess after a couple of weeks. Fruits that are chilled in permanent Siberian ice fare rather better. After more than 30,000 years, and some care from Russian scientists, some ancient fruits have produced this delicate white flower.
These regenerated plants, rising like wintry Phoenixes from the Russian ice, are still viable. They produce their own seeds and, after a 30,000-year hiatus, can continue their family line.
The plant owes its miraculous resurrection to a team of scientists led by David Gilichinsky, and an enterprising ground squirrel. Back in the Upper Pleistocene, the squirrel buried the plant’s fruit in the banks of the Kolyma River. They froze.
Over millennia, the squirrel’s burrow fossilised and was buried under increasing layers of ice. The plants within were kept at a nippy -7 degrees Celsius, surrounded by permanently frozen soil and the petrifying bones of mammoths and woolly rhinos. They never thawed. They weren’t disturbed. By the time they were found and defrosted by scientists, they had been buried to a depth of 38 metres, and frozen for around 31,800 years.
People have grown plants from ancient seeds before. In 2008, Israeli scientists resurrected an aptly named Phoenix palm from seeds that had been buried in the 1st century. But those seeds were a mere 2,000 years old. Those of the new Russian flower – Silene stenophylla – are older by an order of magnitude. They trump all past record-holders.
Svetlana Yashina from the Russian Academy of Sciences grew the plants from immature fruits recovered from the burrow. She extracted their placentas – the structure that the seeds attach to – and bathed them in a brew of sugars, vitamins and growth factors. From these tissues, roots and shoots emerged.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.discovermagazine.com ...
Exactly how old ARE these "ancient squirrels", anyway?
SCRAT FOREVER!
“Flowers regenerated from 30,000-year-old frozen fruits, buried by ancient squirrels”
How do they know this?
What a bunch of hogwash.
“It is with sad hearts that we announce that Dr. David Gilichinsky, longtime Head of Geocryology Lab, Institute for Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science at the Russian Academy of Sciences, passed away Saturday, 18 February 2012.”
Let's just say I'm skeptical of Russian comments on their own accomplishments. God rest his soul.
Thank you for your comments.
You’ve never heard of the Dead Sea Squirrels?
Excellent.
THEFT!
Let’s not justify the wrongful theft of squirrel family wealth in the name of science!
FYI, GGGish. This isn’t genuinely archaeology or religion, but it’s interesting and old.
Perfect! Heh!
“Silene stenophylla”
I would have named them “triffids”
;)
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I should have known someone would beat me to this.
:-)
Squirrel!
“You’ve never heard of the Dead Sea Squirrels?”
Hmmm...Now that you mention it.....
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