The ancient palm seeds in question are identified as being an extinct species (save for these seeds) called Elaeis Virilis, which is a fictional species. Elaeis, however, is a real genus of plants that contain two species called the oil palms. The first species, E. guineensis, also called the African oil palm is mostly found in west and southwest Africa, and is an important plant scientifically, it has had it's entire genome sequenced and has been shown to have promising potentials for being used as a disease resistant crop. The other species, E. oleifera, is the American oil palm and is found in Central and South America, ranging from Honduras to northern Brazil.
Vellek says that the red flu/rust virus has survived two ice ages. The Earth has undergone five major known ice ages in the past 2 billion years, each ice age lasts for roughly 100 million years, the Earth naturally goes through warm and cold periods, even without humans affecting the climate. The two ice ages Vellek is speaking of are the Late Paleozoic Ice Age, also known as the Karoo ice age, and the Late Cenozoic Ice Age, also known as the Antarctic Glaciation. The Late Paleozoic Ice Age occurred around 360 to 260 million years ago, it is believed to have been caused by the rapid spread of plants during the Devonian Period. Plants like trees and ferns spread across the three supercontinents that made up the Earth at the time, all of this plant life caused the atmospheric oxygen concentration to reach 35% (it is at 21% as of 2020) and carbon dioxide levels to drop below 300 parts-per-million (it was 413 PPM in 2020), which caused global temperatures to drop due to the low levels of greenhouse gases like CO2. The Late Cenozoic Ice Age began 33.9 million years ago and is technically still happening, the Earth is less than halfway through this ice age. Ice ages naturally have warmer and colder periods, the warm periods of an ice age are called interglacial periods. The Earth is currently in a interglacial period, global temperatures have been on the rise over the past 11,000 years, though the temperature rise has been accelerated over the past century by human's releasing large amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Even though the Earth is warming it is still technically in an ice age, it is on a period known as an interglacial period, there is currently more ice on Earth than there is outside of an ice age. There are also currently ice sheets in the Northern Hemisphere, which means that there is more ice on Earth than there was during the first 31 million years of the Late Cenozoic Ice Age. During that time, only the Antarctic ice sheets existed. Under normal conditions (without human interference) the current interglacial period would last for another 25,000 to 50,000 years before the Earth began to cool again and the next glacial period of the Late Cenozoic Ice Age began. However due to the large amounts of greenhouse gases humans have released into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels the current interglacial period is expected to last an additional 100,000 years, placing the next glacial period roughly 125,000 to 150,000 years from now.