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These viruses infect amoebae, little more than single-celled blobs that live in soil and water, but experiments indicated that the viruses do still have the potential to be infectious pathogens. The team introduced the viruses into a culture of live amoebae, showing that they were still capable of invading a cell and replicating. The project comes from a team of researchers at Aix-Marseille University in France who previously revived a 30,000-year-old virus found in Siberian permafrost in 2014. With the latest bunch of viruses including one that dates to 48,500 years ago, the researchers have possibly revived the oldest virus yet. “48,500 years is a world record,” Jean-Michel Claverie, one of the paper’s authors and a professor of genomics and bioinformatics at the Aix-Marseille University’s School of Medicine, told New Scientist. Writing in their paper, the researchers explain that more work needs to focus on eukaryote-infecting viruses, noting that “very few studies have been pu...