Extreme Organism
In 1903, the first explorer to trudge across the McMurdo Dry Valleys of the Antarctic wrote, “We have seen no living thing, not even a moss or lichen." He greatly overstated his observations, however. To the expert eye of a biologist, with a little help maybe from a microscope, this ostensibly dead zone is far from lifeless. In the dry streambeds of the parched and frozen land live twenty spe..