Another new find involving something very old...

Not quite Encino Man, but a pretty dang cool discovery nonetheless.  Russian scientists have managed to regenerate fertile plants from 30K year old fruit tissue buried in Siberian permafrost.  The ancient fruit was found in animal burrows in permafrost of the so-called Late Pleistocene ice complex found throughout the eastern Arctic.  The fossil burrows contain thousands of plant material and are located in layers containing bones of large mammals and other animals you'd expect to see in any of the three Ice Age movies.  Radiocarbon dating of the plant material places the deposits as being 28k-32k years old.  The burrows are actually storage chambers, created by squirrels or similar small animals to keep their food.  Apparently, when the little animals went about making their on-site crawl-in freezers, they deposited seeds and fruit against the walls of the ice, which then remained frozen until now.  Although several plant species of differing maturity were tested, researchers found the most promise with the fruit of Silene stenophilla, which according to the paper were "dominant... and in a state of good morphological perservation" (AMS radiocarbon dating showed them to be 31,800 +/- 300 years old).  How'd they get them to flower?  Clonal Micropropagation.  Micropropagation is essentially plant multiplication in vitro.  They took placental tissue from immature seeds and in test tubes containing growth medium, initiated the growth of shoots from the tissue.  The primary shoots grew into rooted plants and the rooted plants grew to sexually mature plants.  The flowers of the mature plants were cross polinated with other ancient plants and so on. 

What's the significance?  Well, other than the fact that something that was placed in a icy hole by a burrowing squirrel was brought back to life in a lab 30 thousand years later (how cool is that?), the experiment provides insight to the long term conservation of biological material, tissue resilience, and phenotypic plasticity (the amount of physiological change the plant underwent through the years when compared to modern representatives) and of course, begs the question of what else can be brought back to life?    Fun to think about.