In a scientific breakthrough, about 42,000 years old frozen worms have been brought back to life and are being considered the oldest living animals on the planet.

A team of Russian scientists discovered two ancient some 42,000 years old frozen roundworms (nematodes) in melting permafrost, been suspended in a deep freeze. The worms have been made to come back to life in petri dishes and are ‘moving and eating’ again.

The study has been published in the journal Doklady Biological Sciences and as per the authors, they represent the first proof of multicellular organisms returning to life after an extremely long-term slumber in Arctic permafrost, reported Live Science.

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Around 300 prehistoric Arctic worm deposits were defrosted in a laboratory in Moscow and analyzed for the study. “After being defrosted, the nematodes showed signs of life. They started moving and eating,” the report read.

One of the specimens was found in a soil sample gathered from a burrow about 100ft underground, dated to be 32,000 years old, whereas the other one was found in a permafrost sample around 41,700 years old buried about 11ft underground.

Since then, two female worms have ‘showed signs of life’ marking it a small yet groundbreaking history for the researchers and marking it as the first evidence of ‘natural cryopreservation’ of multicellular animals, as per The Siberian Times.

Moreover, scientists believe that further study is needed to know more about the mechanisms in such ancient worms that let them survive freezing conditions for such a long time. The researchers also wrote that this ability of the worms suggested that they have some adaptive mechanisms that might have implications in different fields such as cryomedicine, cryobiology, and astrobiology.