Tiny zombies that were frozen in Arctic permafrost for 24,000 years were recently brought back to life and have produced clones in a lab in Russia.

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

submited by

Style Pass

2021-06-08 05:30:05

Tiny zombies that were frozen in Arctic permafrost for 24,000 years were recently brought back to life and have produced clones in a lab in Russia.

These hardy creatures are bdelloid rotifers, or wheel animals, so-named for the wheel-like ring of tiny hairs that circle their mouths. Rotifers are multicellular microscopic animals that live in freshwater environments, and they've been around for about 50 million years.

Researchers previously found that modern rotifers could be frozen at minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 20 degrees Celsius) and then revived up to 10 years later. Now, scientists 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). Once thawed, these ancient rotifers began reproducing asexually through parthenogenesis, creating clones that were their genetic duplicates.

Permafrost — ground that has been frozen solid for two years or more — can preserve snapshots of life (and death) from millennia ago. For instance, a small bird carcass found in Siberian permafrost in 2020 was 46,000 years old but looked "like it [had] died just a few days ago," Live Science previously reported. A frozen and mummified cave bear, also found in Siberia in 2020 and dating to about 39,000 years ago, still had a fleshy black nose and much of its fur.