In 1997 scientists successfully activated some anthrax spores that had lain dormant for eighty years in a museum display in Trondheim, Norway. Other microorganisms have leapt back to life after being released from a 118-year-old can of meat and a 166-year-old bottle of beer. In 1996, scientists at the Russian Academy of Science claimed to have revived bacteria frozen in Siberian permafrost for three million years. But the record claim for durability so far is one made by Russell Vreeland and colleagues at West Chester University in Pennsylvania in 2000, when they announced that they had resuscitated 250-million-year-old bacteria called Bacillus permians that had been trapped in salt deposits two thousand feet underground in Carlsbad, New Mexico. If so, this microbe is older than the continents.

The report met with some understandable dubiousness. Many biochemists maintained that over such a span the microbe's components would have become uselessly degraded unless the bacterium roused itself from time to time. However, if the bacterium did stir occasionally there was no plausible internal source of energy that could have lasted so long. The more doubtful scientists suggested that the sample may have been contaminated, if not during its retrieval then perhaps while still buried.