A team of Russian scientists has successfully grown a living plant from the fruit of a flower that died 32,000 years ago.
The narrow-leafed campion's fruit was buried deep in an ancient arctic squirrel burrow in northern Siberia, the New York Times reports.
The team, led by Svetlana Yashina and David Gilichinsky of the Russian Academy of Sciences, excavated the burrow and found more than 600,000 seeds and fruits.
After unsuccessfully attempting to grow the plants from the seeds, the team of scientists turned to the fruit and extracted the placenta from which they were able to produce 36 of the ancient plants.
Radiocarbon dating put the age of the seeds at 31,800 years, nearly 30,000 older than a date plant grown from a 2000-year-old seed in Israel which previously held the record.
The frozen location of the fruit and the relatively low radioactivity in the area allowed the specimens to survive such a long time, the researchers suggested.
However, some experts, such as Alastair Murdoch at the University of Reading in England, are sceptical and hoping for further proof.
"It's beyond the bounds of what we'd expect," he said of the seed's survival.
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