This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
Last year I blogged about the surprising discovery that mosses released after 400 years of frozen glacial ensquashment had managed to survive and sprout new growth, a finding that radically altered our ideas about regrowth during the retreat of ice ages. Now, a new study in Current Biology pushes that back at least a millennium more with the discovery that mosses extracted from a permafrost moss bank in Antarctica's South Orkney Islands sprouted new growth after treatment no fancier than being placed in a sealed container under a light in a British lab.
I covered the story today for National Geographic Daily News; it's my first article for them, and you can read it here.
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