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Monday, March 18, 2019




32,000 yrs ago an Arctic ground squirrel cached some fruit in its burrow, which was later sealed by sediment & frozen. In the 2000s scientists unearthed the fruit & cultivated its tissue. It grew into this: a Pleistocene ancestor of the narrow-leafed campion (Silene stenophylla)
Some of the excavated squirrel burrows contained *hundreds of thousands* of ancient fruit & seeds. All that genetic information—the ungerminated generations, the apparitions of Ice Age Earth—frozen in time & place, preserving the possibility of resurrection.

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