Interesting piece in SciAm, although now I’m searching for the original paper I see it came out in late July last year. I don’t think it was mentioned here. Here is the paper:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-17330-1
“Aerobic microbial life persists in oxic marine sediment as old as 101.5 million years”
I like the last bits of the SciAm article:
“To be sure, although the sediment in which the cells were trapped was up to 100 million years old, the age of the individual cells remains uncertain. Some are possibly descendants of the original community and therefore much younger. But reproduction is costly, and given the conditions, it seems likely to be rare. Putting it all together – the tight quarters, the lack of spores and the rapid reanimation – the authors of the Nature Communications paper think that the microbes in this impoverished sediment have been alive but idling the entire time…….The people who love dinosaurs (and to be fair, who among us aren’t dinosaur people?) have their museums filled with bones and teeth and tracks. The plant people have their petrified forests and fossil fronds. But the microbe people have something even better: our dinosaurs aren’t dead”