34,000 Year-Old Organisms Found - - Buried Alive

"Looking back to our sensations, and recalling ... this monstrous survival from aeons ... I can only wonder ... In my case, ingrained scientific habit may have helped; for above all my bewilderment and sense of menace, there burned a dominant curiosity to fathom more of this age-old secret ... and what relation to the general world of its time or of other times so unique a concentration of life could have had."

At The Mountains of Madness - H P Lovecraft




"It was actually a very big surprise to me",said Brian Schubert, who discovered ancient bacteria living within tiny, fluid-filled chambers inside the salt crystals.

... "It's permanently sealed inside the salt, like little time capsules," said Tim Lowenstein, a professor in the geology department at Binghamton University and Schubert's advisor at the time.

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