24,000-year-old 'zombies' revived and cloned from Arctic permafrost

Back from the dead... Bdelloid Rotifers are multicellular microscopic animals with a wheel-like ring of tiny hairs that circle their mouths and that live in freshwater environments. They've been around for about 50 million years. Now, scientists from the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science in Pushchino, Russia have resuscitated rotifers that froze in ancient Siberian permafrost during the latter part of the Pleistocene epoch (2.6 million to about 11,700 years ago). These researchers drilled to 11.5 feet (3.5 meters) below the Siberia Alazeya River surface to collect their samples. The soil was radiocarbon dated at ~24,000 years old. Once thawed in the lab, these "zombie" rotifers reanimated and began reproducing asexually through parthenogenesis and created clones that were their genetic duplicates. Read the full new article...

Share this post:

Comments on "24,000-year-old 'zombies' revived and cloned from Arctic permafrost"

Comments 0-5 of 0

Please login to comment