As It Happens5:56Scientists found 46,000-year-old roundworms alive beneath the Arctic ice
Scientists in Russia were thawing a sample of Siberian permafrost, when they found something completely unexpected lurking inside — a pair of living roundworms.
The discovery became even more exciting when the team carbon dated the sample, and realized the permafrost — and the critters inside of it — were 46,000 years old, from an era known as the Pleistocene.
And one of them, it turns out, belongs to a previously unknown species.
“I was totally flabbergasted,” Teymuras Kurzchalia, a scientist who has studied the roundworms, told As It Happens guest host Aarti Pole.
Kurzchalia, a
