[lizma]

Question? What is the oldest specimen where DNA has been able to be extracted? And under what conditions?

[blam]

"Question? What is the oldest specimen where DNA has been able to be extracted? And under what conditions?"

I believe I read that DNA was extracted from a 224 million year old bacteria that was trapped inside a salt crystal. (I'll look and post on it if I find anything)

[blam]

This is all I found.

Thirty Million-Year Sleep: Germ Is Declared Alive!

There were much older spores waiting to be revived. On May 19, 1995, The New York Times carried a front-page story about them (4). Biologists Raul Cano and Monica Borucki had extracted bacterial spores from bees preserved in amber in Costa Rica. Amber is tree-sap that hardens and persists as a fossil.
This amber had entrapped some bees and then hardened between 25 and 40 million years ago.
Bacteria living in the bees' digestive tracts had recognized a problem and turned themselves into spores. When placed in a suitable culture, the spores came right back to life.

As a control, the two biologists also attempted to culture from the same amber a number of samples that contained no bee parts. These cultures were negative, adding credibility to the experiment. This finding was originally reported in the journal Science (5) to general acceptance.

[blam]

Here's the one I think I was thinking about...no mention of DNA though

It's Alive! A 250-Million-Year-Old Bacterium Found In Salt Crystal