A team of Russian scientists have resurrected an entire plant that bloomed when sabre-toothed cats and wooly mammoths roamed the Earth.

The Silene stenophylla is now the oldest plant to be regenerated according to the Russian researchers and it is fertile and produces viable seeds. The team was able to grow the plant from the fruit tissues found in a burrow containing fruit and seeds that had been stuck in the Siberian permafrost for more than 30,000 years.

The revived plant looks very similar to its modern version which still grows in the same area in Siberia. The research team recovered the fruit in a frozen fossilized burrow on the right bank of the lower Kolyma River in Siberia. The sediments in the burrow created a naturally freezing chamber that isolated it from the surface.

"The squirrels dug the frozen ground to build their burrows, which are about the size of a soccer ball, putting in hay first and then animal fur for a perfect storage chamber," said Stanislav Gubin, one of the authors of the study. "It's a natural cryobank."

The Russian researchers had to take cells from the placenta in the campion seeds and then thaw them in culture dishes to grow the whole plants. The team was able to grow 36 ancient plants and the seeds from the ancient campions were able to germinate with 100 percent success.

According to the researchers, the experiment proves that tissue can survive ice conservation for tens of thousands of years. Since the permafrost in Siberia contains a treasure trove of Ice Age fossils ranging from the mammoth, whooly rhinoceros and bison, the research could pave the way for the resurrection of such species.

"If we are lucky, we can find some frozen squirrel tissue," Gubin said. "And this path could lead us all the way to mammoth."

However before the Russians can attempt to revive the wooly mammoth they'll have to convince other members of the scientific community that the plant they revived really hails from the Ice Age.

"It's beyond the bounds of what we'd expect," Alastair Murdoch, an expert on seed viability at the University of Reading in England, told the New York Times. Poppy seeds that were kept at the same temperatures that the Russians reported the campions were stored at were only able to germinate 2 percent of the time.

Eske Willerslev, an expert on ancient DNA at the University of Copenhagen, said the finding was "plausible in principle," but the radiocarbon dating will have to prove the Russian team's claim. The team claimed that they were able to obtain a radiocarbon date of 31,800 years from the seeds from which the plants were propagated.

The scientists reported their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.