Reanimation

Cool.

A U.S. scientist claims to have thawed out a new life form, which he said raises questions about possible contemporary life on Mars. The organism froze on Earth some 30,000 years ago, and was apparently alive all that time and started swimming as soon as it thawed, said Richard Hoover from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

The life form -- a bacterium dubbed Carnobacterium pleistocenium -- probably flourished in the Pleistocene Age, along with woolly mammoths and saber-tooth tigers, said Hoover. He discovered the bacterium near the town of Fox, Alaska, in a tunnel drilled through permafrost -- a mix of permanently frozen ice, soil and rock -- that is kept at a constant temperature of 24.8 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 4 degrees Celcius).

Ooooh, kinda like... Mars' newly discovered frozen ocean.

This vast sea is covered by a layer of dust, which might be heated by the sun and could conduct heat down to create sub-surface layers of water from time to time, Hoover said.

"Those layers would be ideal regions for microbiological activity and so that means that the presence of this frozen sea, if that turns out to be precisely what's going on, it greatly enhances the possibility that there may be life existing on Mars today," he said.

The discovery of the living bacteria in Alaska's permafrost raises another possibility, Hoover said. "The other thing that's exciting: Just like we found in the Fox tunnel of Alaska, frozen biology in the form of unicellular bacteria might even have remained alive, frozen in the Martian sea," he said.

Or giant Martian shrimp, which would instantly render obsolete the phrase "the greatest thing since sliced bread." Next up: Ted Williams' head.