From out of the past, 30kya Flower, 7 mya Elephant tracks

["Richard W. Travsky" <rtravsky@uwyo.edu>]

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/story/2012-02-20/russia-ice-age-flower/53179022/1

It was an Ice Age squirrel's treasure chamber, a burrow containing fruit 
and seeds that had been stuck in the Siberian permafrost for over 30,000 
years. From the fruit tissues, a team of Russian scientists managed to 
resurrect an entire plant in a pioneering experiment that paves the way 
for the revival of other species.

The Silene stenophylla is the oldest plant ever to be regenerated, the 
researchers said, and it is fertile, producing white flowers and viable 
seeds.
...


very cool, with overhead picture

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2012/02/21/huge-set-of-fossil-tracks-preserves-march-of-the-ancient-elephants/

In the desert of the United Arab Emirates, there is an unusual series of 
flat discs imprinted in the sand.  Each one is about 40 centimetres wide, 
and they snake off into the distance in several parallel lines, for 
hundreds of metres.

They are tracks. They were made by a herd of at least 14 early elephants, 
marching across the land between 6 and 8 million years ago. The 
track-makers are long dead, but in the intervening time, nothing has 
buried their tracks or eroded them away. Today, their social lives are 
still recorded in their fossilised footsteps.

The site, known as Mleisa 1, provides the oldest evidence for 
proboscideans  elephants and their close relatives  living in a herd. 
Covering the area of seven football fields, its also probably the largest 
fossil trackway ever discovered, for any animal. When these beasts 
strolled across the landscape, the entire area would have been cut through 
by a river system. Rather than the dry sand of today, it would have been 
lush and green.
...
The site is too massive to photograph from the ground, but the individual 
prints are too small to show up on satellite images. To accurately map the 
trackways, Nathan Craig from Pennsylvania State University attached a 
small pocket camera to a kite and snapped a set of overlapping images from 
above. He stitched the images together into a single large mosaic, which 
you can see on Gigapan.


Get up close and personal here:
http://gigapan.org/gigapans/78542