<\/p>\n
A huge cache of seeds and fruits from the ~25,000-30,000-year-old mammoth steppe of the Yukon region, Canada, which was created by an Arctic ground squirrel.<\/p>\n
Image courtesy of Scott Cocker and via The Secret Lives of Dinosaurs and Dr Dean Lomax<\/p>\n
The burrow was discovered in Siberia along the bank of the Kolyma River, locked in frozen permafrost sediments. Other impressive finds from the sediments included mammoths, woolly rhinos<\/a>, and bison, but there was a particularly exciting discovery of some very old seeds.<\/p>\n Tucked in the storage chambers of our Ice Age squirrel\u2019s burrow, scientists found between 600,000\u2013800,000 frozen seeds. It got them wondering: Could they still be viable?<\/p>\n The burrow was discovered in Siberia along the bank of the Kolyma River, locked in frozen permafrost sediments. Other impressive finds from the sediments included mammoths, woolly rhinos, and bison, but there was a particularly exciting discovery of some very old seeds.<\/p>\n Image courtesy of Yashina et al. 2012. \u201cRegeneration of whole fertile plants from 30,000-y-old fruit tissue buried in Siberian permafrost\u201d. PNAS, 109, 4008\u20134013 via The Secret Lives of Dinosaurs and Dr Dean Lomax<\/p>\n Despite previous failed attempts, the team behind a 2012 paper<\/a> were successful and grew mature plants that were able to produce flowers, fruits, and even more seeds. It was first identified as Silene stenophylla, then most recently as Silene linnaeana, both of which still grow today in the Arctic tundra of Siberia.<\/p>\n \u201cI remember hearing about this discovery when it was originally announced,\u201d said Lomax to IFLScience. \u201cI was blown away. I knew there had been attempts to regenerate Ice Age fossil seeds and fruits before, but never in this way. It all felt very \u2018Jurassic Park\u2019, albeit with Ice Age plants. Cool in every sense of the word.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n So, Ice Age is a documentary, and squirrels are helping scientists to resurrect ancient plants, but does this mean that fossilized plant matter has the potential to go back even further? Could we, with the right discovery, bring back a plant that dinosaurs were feeding on? Unfortunately, the answer is a definitive no.<\/p>\n \u201cThe deeper in time we go, and especially to the dinosaur-dominated Mesozoic Era, essentially means that we\u2019re no longer dealing with ice age preservation,\u201d said Lomax. \u201cThere is no way we could ever find dinosaur-era plants frozen in this way.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI guess the closest you\u2019d come to this is finding exceptional plants in amber, but even then, they\u2019ve been through millions of years of fossilisation. Unlike the frozen seeds, they would not remain fertile.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s for that reason that we also won\u2019t ever find a dinosaur frozen in permafrost<\/a>, much as we might all wish we could. But if it’s dinosaur mummies you\u2019re after, well, we\u2019ve got plenty of those<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ice Age (as in the movie) tells the heartwarming tale of a mammoth, sloth, and saber-toothed cat that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":218062,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[90,56,54,55,4407],"class_list":{"0":"post-218061","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom","11":"tag-unitedkingdom","12":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218061"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218061\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218062"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n