The journal Science published an article on the successful sequencing of DNA from a 30-million-year-old termite, embedded in fossil amber. This sparked the imagination of Hollywood writers and directors. However, it was later demonstrated that they had likely sequenced snippets of human DNA that had accidentally ended up in the sample. Extracting DNA that old is perhaps impossible, due to the multiple factors that destroy and self-destruct the delicate DNA strand, triggered at death. A few years later, however, Svante Paabo demonstrated that it is indeed possible to extract it from 50,000-year-old mitochondrial DNA (almost a thousand times younger than the 1992 hypothesis).
