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The phenomenon you are seeing is called vivipary. Normally plant hormones repress the germination of seeds when they are still in the fruit. If the seeds germinate while in the fruit, it usually leads to death of the sprout, which is not a good thing. Farmers do not want vivipary. It happened with your tomato for one of several reasons, all of which related to the seed not being prevented from sprouting by the plant hormone balance or something directly related to the plant hormone balance.
If you plant the sprouted seeds and grow new tomato plants from them, you can see if the second generation also has early sprouting seeds. If they do, then you can offer the seed to a researcher who may want to study the plants further, just to determine the cause. Otherwise it was simply an environmental effect, not genetic.
To plant these seeds: Just pluck the sprouted seeds out of the tomato and place them into a little pot of soil or planting mix. If they are germinating way too early, they might not have finished developing and might die anyway. But if they were finished developing into mature seeds they should be able to grow in the potting mix. Just keep an eye that they neither drown nor dry out in the little pot.
I tried to grow tomato plants from seeds I harvested from my garden. Although they sprouted, they sprouts grew tall but the true leaves would not emerge. I think its because they were not getting enough sun. Going to try again in the spring.
Wow! You know one year my mom had a tomato from her garden that had a long part pointing out that made the tomato look like a fist and a middle finger. She wanted me to put it up on Facebook with the comment "my mom's opinion of the world"!
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