In the late 1990s a perfectly preserved victim of the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed millions was discovered and exhumed:
From science daily:
In a mass grave in a remote Inuit village near the town of Brevig Mission, a large Inuit woman lay buried under more than six feet of ice and dirt for more than 75 years. The permafrost plus the woman’s ample fat stores kept the virus in her lungs so well preserved that when a team of scientists exhumed her body in the late 1990s, they could recover enough viral RNA to sequence the 1918 strain in its entirety. This remarkable good fortune enabled these scientists to open a window onto a past pandemic—and perhaps gain a foothold for preventing a future one.
— via Sloth Unleashed, which has the coolest name of any blog I visit!
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