Nasa revives ‘weird life forms’ trapped inside crystals for 60,000 years, raising hopes of finding alien organisms in space

John B Knapp
Sep 8, 2018 · 1 min read

Lifeforms which have been living inside crystals for up to 60,000 years have been revived by NASA, raising hopes that alien organisms could be found in extreme environments on other planets.

Penelope Boston, the director of NASA‘s Astrobiology Institute, and her team have spent years exploring Mexico’s Naica Mine in Chihuahua looking for extremophiles, which contain caves as large as cathedrals.

Dr Boston looking at selenite crystals from the Naica mine in Chihuahua. An extraordinary population of microbes has been discovered trapped in crystal in a volcanically heated Mexican cave system

The mine is filled with giant gypsum crystals which look so extraordinary that when Dr Boston first saw a picture, she assumed it had was a Photoshop hoax.

But more astounding, was that inside the crystals, tiny bugs were discovered in a state of ‘geolatency’ — where living organisms remain viable in geological materials for long periods of time.

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