ancient Native American squash revived

This is one very good looking squash.  It's from a news report of viable 800-yr old squash seeds was sent to TPP. Could squash seeds actually be viable 800 years after burial?  Good question. That they are old is without question, but how old. The article says the clay pot was dated to 800 years of age, but were the seed also carbon-dated?  12 yr-old is not necessarily in a12-yr-old bottle, a 100 yr old bottle does not make the scotch any older. The point being that the age of the vessel doesn't necessarily date the contents. But even so these seeds were buried for a long time and it's pretty interesting to see such a fine-looking variety of squash revived. 800 year old viable seed of any plant is pretty extraordinary, so skepticism is warrented. The article also says the "species" was thought extinct. What? How did they know it existed? Clearly that is just wrong, this is not a different species of squash or an extinct species, it would be a unique old heritage variety lost from cultivation, which is still pretty neat, but this is just sloppy reporting TPP thinks. A lot of people throw taxonomic labels around willy-nilly without understanding their significance. There are over 400 varieties of squash, but only 4 species. Personally TPP would like to see what the molecular data says in the hands of a Cucurbita taxonomist. Hey Mac are you paying attention here?

Doesn't that just frost your cake?

Seeds, once in the possession of the Phactor, seem to have a viablity half-life in terms of hours or days.  And the more important they are for your research, the sooner their viability disappears completely.  And then you try to store items of short shelf-life in your freezer only to find them dehydrated beyond any ability to resurrect them.  Now using tissue culture, a Frankensteinian technology, Russian scientists have succeeded in growing a plant from 30,000 yr old seeds frozen in perma-frost.  They did not report that a container of inedible frozen squash was found right next to the seeds. While the seeds were not directly viable, they contained viable tissue, but this is pretty remarkable longevity of frozen tissue.  In this case the plant is a species of Silene (cy-lean-ee)(the radio announcer pronouced it cy-lean just moments ago) that still exists, although small differences can be seen.  In other words, it has changed a bit over 30,000 years.  Now let's do something really cool and revive the wooly mammoth. Have they found any of its seeds?