Scientists revitalise 30,000 year old fruit
- Created on Wednesday, 22 February 2012 19:24
Fruit lying in permafrost for 30,000 years have been matured into plants by scientists in Russia.
The fruit was found in the banks of the Kolyma River in Siberia, a top site for people looking for mammoth bones. The treasure had been stored away by Arctic ground squirrels in the Pleistocene epoch in hibernation burrows.
It is the oldest known plant material to have been brought to life. Prior to this, the record was held by date palm tree seeds in Masada, Israel stored a mere 2,000 years earlier.
The plant, Silene stenophylla, is a flowering plant still growing in the tundra of Siberia. It blooms in the summer with lilac or white petals.
The hibernation burrows were found close to the river. Various layers of earth contained “the bones of large mammals such as mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, bison, horse, deer, and other representatives of fauna from the age of mammoths, as well as plant remains,” according to the scientists.
Ice wedges indicate that the area has been continuously frozen without ever thawing, including the fossilized burrows and their contents.
The squirrels appear to have stashed their store in the coldest part of their burrow, which subsequently froze permanently, presumably due to a cooling of the local climate.
When the researchers compared modern-day plants against their resurrected cousins, they found subtle differences in the shape of petals and the sex of flowers, for reasons that are not evident.
