50 years ago, a 550-year-old seed sprouted
Since then, much older seeds have proved resilient
OLD GROWTH Fruit frozen for more than 30,000 years in a squirrel burrow in Siberia yielded this healthy, flowering plant in 2012.
S. Yashina et al/PNAS 2012
550-year-old seed sprouts —
A seed of the South America herb achira (Canna sp.), taken from an ancient Indian necklace, has germinated, and the young plant is growing well.… Carbon-14 dating of bones at the site sets the seeds’ age at about 550 years.… The plant from the old seed appeared to have a disturbed gravity orientation, but is still growing fairly normally. — Science News, October 12, 1968.
Update
Scientists continue to test plants’ staying power, growing plants from older and older seeds. A roughly 1,300-year-old lotus seed (SN: 8/31/02, p. 132) and then a 2,000-year-old date palm seed (SN: 7/5/08, p. 13) broke the record for world’s oldest viable seeds. Then in 2012, Russian scientists grew a plant from tissue frozen in Siberian permafrost more than 30,000 years ago (SN: 4/7/12, p. 15). These successes give hope to seed bank programs that keep plant species in cold storage for future generations.
