Duvanny Yar, Kolyma River, Siberia. A Silene stenophylla seedling accidentally falls into a squirrel burrow 38 meters deep in the Siberian tundra. After 32,000 years, a team of Russian scientists from the Pushkino Research Center will bring it back to life and make it sprout. The flower, beyond the researchers’ wildest expectations, blooms, and instead of being gobbled up by gigantic mammoths, it will find itself cared for better than a child, photographed and published in the American scientific journal PNAS. The previous record was held by a date palm, whose seed—dated 2,000 years old—will be recovered from the ruins of the fortified citadel of Masada, in the Dead Sea desert in Israel.
