2000 yr old seed growing

I loved the palm trees in Israel, they were many and huge.  Check out this story from the Lekarev Report. Israeli Scientists Get 2000 year old Seed to Sprout Israeli scientists have succeeded in getting a 2,000-year-old date  seed to sprout and grow into a palm of a native type that had been extinct for hundreds of years.  The seed - nicknamed Methusaleh after the oldest person in the Bible -was found in the ancient fortress of Masada, on a hilltop in the Judean desert by the Dead Sea where Jewish zealots committed mass suicide to avoid surrender to the Romans in the first century CE.  Project manager Sarah Sallon hopes the palm will prove to be a fruit-bearing female, but that she will know only in a few years time, when the now more than 1.20-meter-tall sprout grows into a palm tree.  If another of the seeds found at Masada can be cultivated and proves to be male, the two trees will be able to reproduce.  Israel, which now grows only imported date species originating from countries like Morocco, Egypt and Iraq, would be able to cultivate its own native kind: the Judean date palm, or Phoenix dactylifera in Latin, hundreds of years after it died out.  It is no surprise therefore that Sallon sounds excited. According to the  first-century Roman author, zoologist and botanist Pliny the Elder, "huge" forests of date palms stretched in his time from the Sea of Galilee in what is now northern Israel to the Dead Sea in the south, she explains.