These tiny organisms break the microbe age record by 1,900,000,000 years.
Gear-obsessed editors choose every product we review. We may earn commission if you buy from a link. Why Trust Us? Microbial life is known to extend far beyond our measly human life spans, sometimes living for many millions of years. Now, scientists have found a stunning sample of microbes that appear to be two billion years old. Such a discovery could have big implications for studying how life formed and evolved on Earth, and also suggests that similar pockets of long-lived microbes could be hiding somewhere on Mars. Most animals (excluding the seemingly immortal among us ) are defined by relatively short lifespans. While we might live "long and full lives," as the saying goes, our time in the universe is merely an attosecond in the grand timeline of all things. But the world of microbes plays by different rules. In 2020, for example, scientists successfully revived 100-million-year-old microbes, making them the longest-lived microbes known to science. Now, researchers from the University of Tokyo report that they cracked open rich ore deposits gathered from the Bushveld Igneous Complex in northeastern South Africa and, surprisingly, found two-billion-year-old microbes living within the sample. While this certainly smashes the microbial lifespan world record, the microbes also showed little evolutionary changes due to their extreme isolation, allowing them…