Bacteriophages on a bacterium. (Graham Beards/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0) ================================================================================= Like the start of a horror movie, ancient creatures are emerging from the cold storage of now-melting permafrost: from incredibly preserved extinct megafauna like the woolly rhino, to the 40,000-year-old remains of a giant wolf, and bacteria over 750,000 years old. Not all of them are dead. Centuries-old moss was able to spring back to life in the warmth of the laboratory. So too, incredibly, were tiny 42,000-year-old roundworms. These fascinating glimpses of organisms from Earth's long distant past are revealing the history of ancient ecosystems, including details of the...