Ice Age Flower Blooms Again

Squirrels bury the darnedest things. And one squirrel about 32,000 years ago buried the fruit of a tiny Arctic flower which was preserved in Russian permafrost until a few scientists discovered the cryo-preserved posey. They nurtured the plant and resurrected it using hormones and then grew new plants from the original.

The plant offspring from the original reanimated narrow-leafed campion also bloomed and produced seeds to grow into new plants, which resemble the modern version of the Silene stenophylla.

Svetlana Yashina and David Gilichinsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences research center at Pushchino just outside Moscow unearthed the plant matter a few years ago and claim that they have done all the right science to prove its authenticity.

If proved that the flower is indeed from an extinct variety then this will uproot the current old plant champion — a 2,000-year-old date palm found in the walled fortress of Masada in Israel.

Grant Zazula of the Yukon Paleontology Program at Whitehorse in Yukon Territory, Canada calls the discovery an amazing breakthrough. He tells the New York Times, “I have no doubt in my mind that this is a legitimate claim.” And he is a bit of an authority on accurately dating plants frozen in permafrost. The plant biologist was responsible for discrediting a goldminer’s claim that ancient lupine seeds were 10,000 years old. He discovered they were modern and the result of contamination.

But not everyone is so sure that the Russian team’s claim is valid.

Alistair Murdoch, a British expert on seed viability says that when poppy seeds are kept at minus seven degrees Celsius — the temperature the Russian plant excavators claim — only two percent of the seeds can germinate after 160 years. So the odds of any seeds being viable after over 30,000 are slim. He says, “It’s beyond the bounds of what we’d expect.”

But Yashina and Gilichinsky claim that the way the plant material was preserved allowed the seeds to stay viable. They believe shortly after ancient squirrels dug the burrows they were covered with windblown earth and eventually buried under 125 feet of sediment while being permanently frozen at minus 7 degrees Celsius.

And they also credit the squirrels themselves. The rodents in this region liked to build their refrigerators next to the permafrost to keep their food supply cold during the summer so the material was chilled from the start. And the makeup of the plant material also aided in its preservation. The placenta of the campion is high in phenols and sucrose, which are both good anti-freeze agents.

Stanislav Gubin, one of the study authors says, “The squirrels dug the frozen ground to build their burrows, which are about the size of a soccer ball, putting in hay first and then animal fur for a perfect storage chamber.” He adds, “It’s a natural cryobank.”

After discovering nearly 600,000 seeds and fruits the Russian team tried to revitalize the seeds and failed. The old, frozen seeds wouldn’t germinate. So the team decided to take some cells from the plant placenta where the fruit produces seeds. They thawed them out and grew them in a the lab using a plant cloning method.

Eventually they were able to grow 36 plants from the ancient cells. And they say the plant looked identical to the modern-day campion until it bloomed. Then they discovered that it had a different flower pattern. The ancient plant produced narrower, more splayed-out petals. And the team radiocarbon dated the seeds that were attached to the placenta which grew the living plants. They dated back to 31,800 years.

The research appears in the current issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Just before the article appeared Dr. Gilichinsky’s daughter said he was suffering from an asthma attack and couldn’t comment on the findings. Then University of California Berkeley physicist Buford Price said Dr. Gilichinsky had died suddenly from a heart attack over the weekend.

Now University of Copenhagen ancient DNA expert Eske Willerslev says Dr. Yashina needs to run DNA analysis to prove the ancient flowers are ancestors of the now-living plants. He says right now, “It’s all resting on [the radiocarbon date]— if there’s something wrong there it can all fall part.”

The research team in the PNAS article says this experiment proves permafrost can serve as a natural repository of ancient life and could pave the way for the revival of other species, plant and animal.

Dr. Gubin says, “If we are lucky, we can find some frozen squirrel tissue. And this path could lead us all the way to [the] mammoth.”