If ancient life is in salt, wouldn’t normal geological processes occasionally release them as continents split and merge? Not to mention drilling for oil and gas? The risk of “releasing” them seems low.
But not the first ancient bacteria thought to have been discovered. Here’s another. https://www.nature.com/articles/news001019-9
But the validity of their results has been questioned–and from what I can tell, has been neither supported or refuted:
https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article/33/1/e93/129405/new-evidence-for-250-ma-age-of-halotolerant
Have they been alive all this time? Well, bacterial spores don’t have any detectable metabolism and are thus in a state that is described as cryptobiotic by microbiologists. So, we wouldn’t say that they’ve been alive all this time–just viable.