A microscopic animal has been revived after slumbering in the Arctic permafrost for 24,000 years.
Bdelloid rotifers typically live in watery environments and have an incredible ability to survive. Russian scientists found the creatures in a core of frozen soil extracted from the Siberian permafrost using a drilling rig.
“Our report is the hardest proof as of today that multicellular animals could withstand tens of thousands of years in cryptobiosis, the state of almost completely arrested metabolism,” said Stas Malavin, a researcher at the Soil Cryology Laboratory at the Pushchino Scientific Center for Biological Research in Russia.
Earlier research by other groups had shown that the rotifers could survive up to 10 years when frozen. In a new study, the Russian researchers used radiocarbon dating to determine that the critters they recovered from the permafrost — ground that is frozen year-round, apart from a thin layer near the surface — were about 24,000 years old.The study was published in the journal Current Biology on Monday.
Stems of Antarctic moss were successfully regrown from a 1,000-year-old sample that had been covered by ice for about 400 years, and a living campion flower was regenerated from seed tissue, likely stored by an Arctic squirrel, that had been preserved in 32,000-year-old permafrost. Simple worms, called nematodes, were revived from the permafrost from two places in northeastern Siberia, in sediments that were more than 30,000 years old.
