Plant News Articles

Scientists resurrect ancient seed from Dead Sea excavation

A long extinct date palm tree has been grown from seed - a seed found in an archaeological dig that carbon dating fixed at about 2000 years old! The seed was excavated in 1963 at Masada, a mountaintop fortress build by King Herod overlooking the Dead Sea, and had been stored at room temperature for further study until three years ago, when a team of Israeli researchers soaked it in a bath of fertilizer and enzymes before planting it in a small pot. Today, the plant is 1.5 meters tall. They call it Methuselah, after the oldest person in the Bible. What's next for Methuselah? Aside from pending results of genetic studies to determine if the resurrected date palm is in fact an extinct cultivar, it will be a couple years before the tree can bear flowers, at which point things will get very interesting. Date palms are dioecious, which means they have separate male and female plants. So Methuselah will not reproduce without some help from a modern cultivar to either pollinate it or accept its pollen (depending on whether or not Methuselah is a boy or a girl). If Methuselah flowers and cross-pollination with modern date palms is successful, the research team hopes to re-introduce an ancient cultivar to the date palm gene pool. This could lead to the breeding of new date cultivars with advantageous traits from Methuselah, which have not been observed in nearly 2000 years. We hope Methuselah's children are tasty!