Abstract
IN an article contributed to “Russia To-day Bross Service” (Sept. 12, 1939) Prof. P. Kapterev gives an account of his experiments with organisms contained in frozen soil from Siberia. A paper by Prof. Kapterev on his discoveries was read before the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. during 1936 (see NATURE, 138, 714; 1936). The flora associated with the mammoth has been known for years from the contents of the food canal of frozen individuals, but it is astounding to learn that plants and animals contemporary with the mammoth have been brought to life after remaining in a state of suspended animation which at a low computation must have extended over twenty thousand years. The soil from which the organisms were obtained consisted of silt strata obtained in the galleries of mines in the taiga of Siberia at a depth of 131¼ feet, far within the limit of the permanently frozen soil, for even in the hottest summer the thaw never penetrates deeper than seven to ten feet. In contemporary strata the explorers found the bones of mammoths, the woolly rhinoceros, bison, and musk-ox, indicating a period contemporary with the interglacial period which came between the last two Ice Ages (Riss-Würm period) or with the last Ice Age (Würm period). The soil samples were placed in sterilized containers in a sterilized atmosphere, and they eventually yielded living organisms which included several kinds of soil bacteria, including a distinctive nitrogen bacterium, fungi and water plants, the majority being closely related to present-day forms. From another sample of later geological date, taken at a depth of 14 feet, twenty different kinds of water-plants, mosses, filaments of fungi and a crustacean (entomostracan) were obtained, and placed in favourable laboratory conditions these organisms began to multiply rapidly. But this stratum is reckoned to have been only from one to three thousand years old !
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Contemporaries of the Mammoth. Nature 144, 702 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144702b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144702b0
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