Creatures buried in soil for over a century burst back to life in Toronto waterfront

Toronto’s multibillion-dollar effort to re-naturalize both a major river and the surrounding lands is nearing completion. Photograph: Vid Ingelevics & Ryan Walker

When Shelby Riskin was handed disk-shaped samples of century-old soil from Toronto’s waterfront, the ecosystem ecologist was hopeful she might find trace evidence of plants – cattails, bulrushes, water lilies and irises – that had once populated a long-destroyed wetland.

But when she and a graduate student peered through a microscope, they watched in astonishment as a brown wormlike creature greedily munching through green clumps of algae as if more than 130 years hadn’t passed since its last meal.