You may recall that Russian scientists recently breached the ice sheet covering Lake Vostok, an ice sheet that sheltered the lake from the rest of the world for millennia. Initial reports suggested that the lake was devoid of life, but not so fast. Now Russian scientists are claiming that samples taken from May 2012 show up to three different bacterial life. Stranger still, the scientists also claim that the DNA extracted from the organisms match only 86% of known species. According to the article read at the Guardian, the 90% threshold is typically used as the 'line-in-the-sand' for saying if a life form is unique.
Take all this with a grain of salt though. These reports remain unconfirmed and have not been scrutinized by the scientific community.
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