Tell us stories about the ice age, flower.
Photo: The Institute of Cell Biophysics of the Russian Academy of Sciences
In a newly published paper, a Russian team of scientists claim to have used tissue from the placenta of a Silene stenophylla frozen in the Siberian permafrost nearly 32,000 years ago — for the sake of comparison, Nicolas Cage’s last good movie was 12,000 years ago — to grow the flower in the present day. If it all checks out, it would beat the previous record of the “oldest plant … grown from ancient tissue” by, oh, about 30,000 years, according to the Times. Flowers could just be the start, though. “If we are lucky, we can find some frozen squirrel tissue,” Stanislav Gubin, one of the study’s authors, told the AP. “And this path could lead us all the way to mammoth,” and its sweet, delicious mammoth meat.
