Scientists have successfully bloomed flowers from seeds frozen in the permafrost
30 thousand years ago!
First, that is so cool. Thanks for posting.
Second, I can’t believe it just hit me - your username. :smack:
The story at nytimes.com says that the carbon dating has yet to be confirmed and that in another similar case the seed turned out to be a contaminant and not really the old seed. The science on this discovery is looking good to date.
Now, something relevant to my username sounds apt here:
Well now, I heard on public radio this afternoon that carbon dating has confirmed the announced age of the seed.
Doesn’t impress me though - I’ve got seeds older than that in my refrigerator. Besides, what they got to germinate is just some old weed. Couldn’t they find something more ornamental or startling, like a plant that snags and eats wooly mammoths?
As I always wonder when I read about things like this, what do those folks who continue to insist that the world is only a few thousand years old do when something like this comes up?
I think this is extremely cool. And, well, it never occurred to me that there were squirrels around back then. Shows what I know.
from what i read they didn’t sprout a seed. they cultured frozen plant tissue.
Didn’t you see those animated “Ice Age” documentaries?
Followed by the inevitable meteor shower.
Also cool ~ but I don’t feel bad for not ‘getting it’ until now.
They insist that carbon dating isn’t accurate, or gives misleading results.
Thank you for posting this.
An article in Science 158, 1967 documents the germination of 10’000 year old lupine seeds.
Or that God just “created them old.” It’s getting pretty hard to rationally argue against the multitides of ways that science is showing that basically everything is older than the young earthers say it can be, so the obvious answer is that it was just created that way.
I guess that if God took all that effort to make it look like things are that old…it would behoove us to pretend that we believe that they are really that old. God is all powerful, right?
Now that these old seeds have been germinated, can the bad SyFy movie be far behind, where they were actually mutants/dangerous, and are going to take over the world?
I’ve seen this account too. The details, wherever I read them, sound more likely than the seed germination headlines.
Here is one account. How scientists brought 30,000-year-old flower back to life - CSMonitor.com “[they] did not germinate the seeds directly, but took immature fruit tissue and cultured it in a nutrient-rich goop.” I had a couple of graduate courses in horticulture and did some in vitro propagation. This sounds about right.