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Magnified image showing microbes revived from 101.5 million-year-old sediment. Credit: JAMSTEC ======================================================================= For decades, scientists have gathered ancient sediment samples from below the seafloor to better understand past climates, plate tectonics, and the deep marine ecosystem. In a new study published in Nature Communications, researchers reveal that given the right food in the right laboratory conditions, microbes collected from sediment as old as 100 million years can revive and multiply, even after laying dormant since large dinosaurs prowled the planet. The research team behind the new study, from the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), the URI Graduate...

The tiny organisms had survived in the South Pacific seabed - in sediment that is poor in nutrients, but has enough oxygen to allow them to live. Microbes are among the earth's simplest organisms, and some can live in extreme environments where more developed life forms cannot survive. After incubation by the scientists, the microbes began to eat and multiply. Professor and study co-author Steven D'Hondt, from the University of Rhode Island, said the microbes came from the oldest samples taken from the seabed. "In the oldest sediment we've drilled, with the least amount of food, there are still living...