Extinct Squash Found and Revived.
- Thread starter manumuskin
- Start date
Plants never cease to amaze us; re-sprouting 800-year-old squash seed is quite a feat. David Gilichinsky of the Russian Academy headed a team that sprouted 32,000-year Silene stenophylla, an arctic relative of Pine Barrens campions (starry – S. stellata; white – S. latifolia; fire-pink – S. virginica).
Sadly Gilichinsky passed away (2012), but I did bump into him in Siberia and Alaska. He also demonstrated that microbes could remain viable after 5-million years if preserved in frozen ground, which gave hope to Martian researchers that viable ancient life might be found on frozen Mars as well.
Gilichinsky at Gornoknyazevsk settlement, Yamal-Nenets;
cruising on Ob River, Yamal-Nenets
His student, Alexey Lupachev, is spearheading a project called "What was the soil where the mammoth grazed" to study Eastern Siberia's ancient shallow and cold soils to to figure out how could such ground sustain abundant herds of herbivores (mammoth, bison, deer, moose, horse, woolly rhinos, etc.) upon sparse vegetation as their food supply. Nice work to help understand the mid-Atlantic's frozen past:
S-M
Sadly Gilichinsky passed away (2012), but I did bump into him in Siberia and Alaska. He also demonstrated that microbes could remain viable after 5-million years if preserved in frozen ground, which gave hope to Martian researchers that viable ancient life might be found on frozen Mars as well.
Gilichinsky at Gornoknyazevsk settlement, Yamal-Nenets;
cruising on Ob River, Yamal-Nenets
His student, Alexey Lupachev, is spearheading a project called "What was the soil where the mammoth grazed" to study Eastern Siberia's ancient shallow and cold soils to to figure out how could such ground sustain abundant herds of herbivores (mammoth, bison, deer, moose, horse, woolly rhinos, etc.) upon sparse vegetation as their food supply. Nice work to help understand the mid-Atlantic's frozen past:
