Of course, the silly frog cloning part didn't help it's credibility either...
UTAH SCIENTIST SAYS HE HAS EXTRACTED DNA FROM DINOSAUR BONES
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
N.Y. Times
After two years of painstaking analysis and hundreds of unsuccessful attempts, a
scientist at Brigham Young University has extracted the genetic material DNA
from what he thinks are bone fragments of 80-million-year-old dinosaurs.
The surprise was that the recovered DNA bore little or no resemblance to that of
any modern animals. It is "like nothing we've ever seen before," said Dr. Scott
R. Woodward, an associate professor of microbiology at the university in Provo,
Utah, who directed the study.
Other scientists, however, are skeptical of the research and want to see the
results tested further by independent laboratories.
http://dml.cmnh.org/1994Nov/msg00285.html
In Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton's best-selling novel and the new motion picture, scientists bring to life a menagerie of dinosaurs. They clone the behemoths by retrieving dinosaur DNA from fossilized insects that fed on the dinosaurs' blood.
Farfetched? The concept of sequencing portions of dinosaur DNA could soon become a reality, according to George O. Poinar, a paleontologist at the University of California at Berkeley whose research inspired Crichton's plot. "We've got a project underway to extract dinosaur DNA from insects preserved in amber samples," he reports. Cloning the long-extinct giants, however, isn't possible yet. Still, he doesn't rule out the possibility that the technology for cloning could become available sometime in the future.
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1430/is_n9_v15/ai_13768756