Last week, a little movie called Jurassic World debuted. You might have heard something about it. Paleontologists certainly have been jawing about it for a while, particularly how the movie’s dinosaurs stack up against the actual animals emerging from the rock.* But all the arguments about enfluffled dinosaurs and bunny hands have missed a more fundamental issue – could scientists ever recover enough intact dinosaur goo to populate a real Jurassic World?

When the first Jurassic Park premiered in 1993, finding non-avian dinosaur DNA seemed a certainty. Two days before the official release of the movie Raúl Cano and colleagues announced that they had sequenced the DNA of a 135-120 million year old,