LET US go back to the Ice Age is their message. A squirrel’s burrow of that period in the Siberian permafrost has revealed a real treasure trove of fossils of plants and seeds. A team of Russians from the Institute of Cell Biophysics of the Russian Academy of Sciences have gone ahead to plant those seeds and have successfully resurrected the plants as well as its flowers.

These treasures date back to the Ice Age – and belong to a 30,000-year-old period. The biological name of the plant is Sylene stenophylla and it was regenerated from the tissue of the fossilized fruit. Scientists are obviously excited about this discovery and plan to recreate other species from other fossilized remains. In their opinion, the Siberian permafrost can be said to be a natural depository for ancient life forms.

Svetlana Yashina who heads the research is keeping her fingers crossed. She is waiting to unearth remains of the mammoth. If her team succeeds, it could pave the way to bring back to life those animals that have gone extinct. It reminds one of the movie, Jurassic Park in which dinosaurs were created in the laboratory from fossilized remains – in view of this latest findings of the Russian team, Steven Spielberg’s movie need not be written off as pure fiction. It now does appear to be within the realms of possibility.