Israeli scientists have succeeded in getting a 2,000-year-old date seed to sprout and grow into a palm of a native type that had been extinct for hundreds of years.

That, they say, makes it the oldest known seed ever germinated.

The seed was found in the ancient fortress of Masada, on a hilltop in the Judean desert by the Dead Sea where Jewish zealots committed mass suicide to avoid surrender to the Romans in the first century AD.

It is no surprise that project manager Sarah Sallon sounds excited. According to the first-century Roman author, zoologist and botanist Pliny the Elder, "huge" forests of date palms stretched in his time from the Sea of Galilee in what is now northern Israel to the Dead Sea in the south, she explains.

But after the Romans conquered the region in the first century AD and as a result of other, later invasions, the date palm forests, which she explains need careful and continuous cultivation, gradually died out.

The seeds were found at Masada during the 1963-65 excavations of the fortress built in the first century BC.

To date, the oldest seed on record ever to have taken roots and grown into a plant was 1,300 years old and that of a lotus-found in a dried-up lake in China and cultivated at the University of California.