According to the New York Times, a team of Russian scientists have shaken up the world of botany with a report that an arctic flower resembling the Silene stenophylla, or the narrow-leafed campion, which supposedly died 32,000 years ago, is generating fruit from its placenta. 

The report will appear in Tuesday’s issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The fruit was carried and stored by arctic ground squirrels in their burrows on the banks of the lower Koyman River in northeastern Siberia, the ice-age stomping grounds of the mammoth and wooly rhinoceroses. There they remained frozen and locked in time until scientists began digging through the tundra a few years ago.

If true, “this would be the oldest plant by far that has ever been grown from ancient tissue,” the New York Times reports. “The present record is held by a date palm grown from a seed some 2,000 years old that was recovered from the ancient fortress of Masada in Israel.”

“They then took cells from the placenta, the organ in the fruit that produces the seeds. They thawed out the cells and grew them in culture dishes into whole plants,” the Times reports. In short: the fruit went forth and multiplied.

As these things go, however, skeptics abound. "It’s beyond the bounds of what we’d expect,” Alastair Murdoch, an expert on seed viability at the University of Reading in England told the Times.

Read here for more on the “amazing breakthrough.”