Well cut off my legs and call me Shorty (is that ableist?). A new report in the journal Nature Communications shows that some bacteria can remain dormant for over 100 million years in marine sediments—an unbelievable amount of time for an organism to remain “alive”—if you call it “alive.” I do: after all, the bacteria collected and revived by the researchers retained their ability to metabolize, take up labeled organic substances, and reproduce. Dormancy, to me, at least, is not the same thing as “death”.
Click the screenshot to read the paper (the pdf is here and the full reference is at the bottom).
The experiment was laborious yet the results are simple. If you want to know the gory details, the paper is there for your reading.
In short, the authors sampled clay sediments of different ages from the South Pacific Gyre, and did so in a…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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