This is Scientific Americans' 60-Second Science.

I'm Karen Hopkins.

What has one head, one foot, and one heck of an origin story?

No, it's not a strange new superhero.

It's a microscopic worm called a rotifer that was brought back to life after spending

about 25,000 years locked in the Arctic Permafrost.

This tale is told in the journal Current Biology.

This is a long-term topic for lab.

Stosma-11, of the Institute of Physiochemical and Biological Problems in Social Science,

in Poshino, Russia, he and his colleagues have spent decades probing the Siberian Permafrost.

And they've managed to revive a variety of interesting organisms, from a plant seed and

simple bacteria to scores of more sophisticated single-celled critters.

We have isolated around 30 or maybe 40 strands already, or unicellular, eukaryotes.

But for some reason, people weren't totally wowed by resurrected amoebas.

Yeah, they don't respect that.

Rotifers are much, much better.

Rotifers are better, or at least more interesting, because they're multi-cellular animals,

with a head and a body, that can eat, crawl around, and make more rotifers.

Then considering they're more or less teeny-tiny worms, they're actually cute little guys.

They don't have guys, you know, they're all females.

In fact, these little ladies reproduce asexually, laying eggs that hatch into the next generation

of self-propagating rotifers.

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