Matt Kaplan
2012 · Nature
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The 521-year half life of DNA makes that pretty much impossible I’m afraid. Probably won’t be able to bring back anything more than a few hundred thousand years old if that. See: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11555
The half-life study states degradation might take "roughly 1.5 million years" in permafrost conditions. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11555
Just one year after that paper claiming the DNA half life of 521 years[1], the DNA of horse from 700k years ago was sequenced [2]. That would be about 1344 half-lives. Then, in 2021 the DNA of a mammoth that lived 1.2 million years ago was sequenced. To answer your question, dinosaurs last lived 65 million years ago. [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11555 [2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/130626-an... [3] https://www.science.org/content/article/mammoth-molars-yield...
Doing some quick searching[0], it seems that DNA has a half life of ~500 years, which is much longer than I originally would have guessed. Still, I imagine being in contact with metal might significantly speed up the degradation. Metal and metal ions tend to catalyze all sorts of reactions. [0]https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11555
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