The Oldest Plant

Botanists have something to celebrate; frozen remains of a 32,000 year-old flower discovered in an ancient animal burrow buried deeply in earth, and covered by the icy tundra was successfully germinated by Russian scientists; felt to represent the oldest ever plant grown from an ancient seed. It is a delicate, lovely plant, with fragile white flowers, a member of the campion family.

Svetlana Yashina via The New York Times" title="An undated handout photo of a plant that has been generated from the fruit of a little arctic flower. Russian biologists say that they have grown a plant that is 32,000 years old from seeds buried in permafrost."

It truly is a pedigreed, certainly not primitive, plant, exquisite in its presentation. It would represent a treasure in any ardent gardener's flower bed.

A narrow-leafed campion, it was grown in a petri dish from organic material taken from the Siberian Arctic, where it was discovered. Nurtured to grow in its own familiar soil, although the environment is dramatically changed from what it was like when this flower grew in the Arctic.

The project results were published in the latest issue of The Proceedings of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, produced by a team of scientists led by Svetlana Yashina and David Gilichinsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences research center at Pushchino, close to Moscow.

Co-author David Gilichinsky helped bring this project to a wildly successful conclusion, but did not live long enough to enjoy full acclaim, since he died on Saturday.

Present-day campions look very much like this ancient-but-resurrected flower. Those grown today have wider petals, closer together. I

t is assumed that a rodent, during the Upper Paleolithic period - when our remote-in-time human ancestors were just beginning to communicate by speech on the way to creating a common language for their geographic areas - prepared for the onset of winter by diligently storing away seeds.

The theory, supported by the evidence at hand, is that the burrow, like others nearby, became filled with earth and particles blown by the wind, and ultimately, over time, buried under 125 feet of sediment, then permanently frozen at -7C.

A frigid river in Northeastern Siberia that at one time abounded with woolly rhinoceroses and mammoths, was where the burrow was discovered.

Similar such burrows can e found in the Canadian Yukon, in territory that escaped glaciation during the last ice age. "We've tried to grow the seeds, but they've never worked", explained Grant Zazula, Yukon Paleontologist. Who spoke of the potential of repeating the process for extinct, ancient mammals.

"We find partially-preserved mammoth carcasses in the Siberian tundra that are 30,000 years old. This raises the potential that you could have viable sperm cells and egg cells within some of those mammals." Preferably not.

Experimenting with the possibility of restoring ancient plants to take their place in a garden is one thing; previously-extinct animals roaming about at a time long past their expiration date, not so great.

And should any brilliant scientist ever decide, on his own initiative to play around with cloning homo sapiens, that would represent a true horror story. Let them all rest in history with our admiration for having pioneered humankind's place on this Earth.