I vaguely remember the story about the bacteria found in salt deposits. They were 250 million years old, or 125 million, or something in the hundreds-of-millions - not 250 billion. At any rate, the claim was hardly 100% accepted by the scientific community. Contamination by today's bacteria is always a possible explanation. In fact, IIRC, they had claimed that the ancient bacteria were very similar to some strain of current bacteria, which is what made others rather suspicious of their claims.
I remember someone had claimed to find iron oxides as a residue from ancient hemoglobin, but I forget if they said they recovered the hemoglobin itself or what.
Do you have any cites for these stories, so we can grab onto some better facts? (Not that that has ever stopped cre's or evo's before... :-)
At any rate, I wouldn't be surprised if someone, somewhere was able to recover at least parts of an ancient protein, and even a very old bacteria seems possible. But how old is "old" to you? How long do you think bacteria should be able to lay dormant & still get revived? How long should a protein be able to fend off total breakdown?