Obviously having never seen any sci-fi monster movies, Russian scientists have revived bdelloid rotifers or microscopic wheel animals that have been frozen for 24,000 years in the Siberian permafrost.
Russian scientists at the Institute of Physicochemical and Biological Problems in Soil Science in Pushchino, Russia, dug down to 11.5 feet (3.5 m) below the surface in Siberia's Alazeya River to a layer of soil that has been frozen since the Pleistocene epoch.
There, they found rotifers in a cryptobiotic state. Then, the scientists simply put the organism in a Petri dish filled with suitable medium and watched as the microorganism recovered from their dormancy, started moving and multiplied by creating clones of themselves.
"Organisms isolated alive from permafrost potentially represent the best models for cryobiology research and could provide valuable clues about the mechanisms that allow those organisms to survive," said lead researcher Stas Malavin to LiveScience. "Those mechanisms could then be tested in cryopreservation experiments with human cells, tissues and organs."