Revived Into Activity After Stasis
- Various claims have been made about reviving bacterial spores to active metabolism after millions of years. There are claims of spores from amber being revived after 40 million years, and spores from salt deposits in New Mexico being revived after 240 million years. These claims have been made by credible researchers, but are not universally accepted. In a related find, a scientist was able to coax 34,000 year old salt-captured bacteria to reproduce and his results were duplicated at a separate independent laboratory facility.
- A seed from the previously extinct Judean date palm was revived and managed to sprout after nearly 2,000 years.
- Silene stenophylla was grown from fruit found in an ancient squirrel's cache. The germinated plants bore viable seeds. The fruit was dated to be 31,800 years old ± 300 years.
- In 1994 a seed from a sacred lotus (Nelumbo nucifera), dated at roughly 1,300 years old ± 270 years, was successfully germinated.
Read more about this topic: List Of Long-living Organisms
Famous quotes containing the words revived, activity and/or stasis:
“In ordinary speech the words perception and sensation tend to be used interchangeably, but the psychologist distinguishes. Sensations are the items of consciousness—a color, a weight, a texture—that we tend to think of as simple and single. Perceptions are complex affairs that embrace sensation together with other, associated or revived contents of the mind, including emotions.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“A worm is as good a traveler as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. With all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I shall speak of ... how melancholy and utopia preclude one another. How they fertilize one another.... Of the revulsion that follows one insight and precedes the next.... Of superabundance and surfeit. Of stasis in progress. And of myself, for whom melancholy and utopia are heads and tails of the same coin.”
—Günther Grass (b. 1927)