A microscopic animal has come back to life after slumbering in the Arctic permafrost for 24,000 years."Our report is the hardest proof as of today that multicellular animals could withstand tens of thousands of years in cryptobiosis, the state of almost completely arrested metabolism," said Stas Malavin.

This is frightening in terms of what type of viruses could emerge from the melting permafrost. To understand how the creature survived in suspended animation in the frozen ground, the researchers froze and thawed modern day rotifers living in permafrost regions. They found that the creatures could withstand the formation of ice crystals while they were slowly frozen.While not all the rotifers survived the freezing process, the study suggested that the creatures have some mechanism that can can shield their cells. The takeaway is that a multicellular organism can be frozen and stored as such for thousands of years and then return back to life -- a dream of many fiction writers," Malavin said in the statement.