Best of Memories 20 years
Revisited
No.104 Issue 3/2014
Title
Frozen Secrets
Sowing seeds of the past
Text
Selina Tan
At almost 32,000 years old, the recently regenerated narrow-leaf campion (Silene stenophylla Ledeb.), native to Siberia, stands as the longest living multicellular organism on Earth. An extant species of flowering plant in the family Caryophyllaceae, it sprouts from the oldest viable seed in the world – thought to have vanished together with the mammoth steppe ecosystem about 13,000 years ago. Amazingly, it was the ground squirrel’s
