NASA Scientist Revive 10,000-Year-Old Microorganisms (bbc.com)

"Scientists have extracted long-dormant microbes from inside the famous giant crystals of the Naica mountain caves in Mexico -- and revived them," reports the BBC. An anonymous reader writes: "The organisms were likely to have been encased in the striking shafts of gypsum at least 10,000 years ago, and possibly up to 50,000 years ago," according to the BBC, which calls the strange lifeforms "another demonstration of the ability of life to adapt and cope in the most hostile of environments." With no light, extremophile species must "chemosynthesise," deriving all their energy by extracting minerals from rocks. These ancient microbes "are not very closely related to anything in the known genetic databases," according to the new director of NASA's Astrobiology Institute, who helped conduct the research, and believes that the microbes could help suggest what life might look like on other planets. The BBC adds that many other scientists "suspect that if life does exist elsewhere in the Solar System, it is most likely to be underground, chemosynthesising like the microbes of Naica."

Comments

Re:Whythe vaguness about the age?

[bruce_the_loon]

Having watched the National Geographic documentary on the expeditions into the caves, the chances of external contamination for the samples looked acceptably low. The samples were taken from an inch or more inside the crystals, from liquid inclusions accessed by drilling with sterilized drill bits and sterile transfer. The sample sites were in deeper areas of the cave to further reduce the risk.

Combine that with the lack of a close genetic match to modern samples, and the level of confidence in the samples been uncontaminated should be satisfactory high. To contaminate the inclusion, you'd have to breach it, contaminate it and the crystal would have to regrow (something it doesn't do when out of water) all deep inside a cave so hot that it can kill in a couple of minutes without protection.