Can you get DNA from fossils?

Parts of the genome can be preserved, depending on the fossil. This is Ancient DNA. read more

Fossils are often contaminated with modern human DNA during handling, and it is difficult to tell this apart from ancient DNA Also, DNA falls apart over the course of time. "It breaks up into very small fragments so it is quite technically complicated to put it all back together again," explains Dr Robert Foley, the director of the Leverhulme Centre for Human Evolutionary Studies at the University of Cambridge, UK. read more

The oldest DNA samples ever recovered are from insects and plants in ice cores in Greenland up to 800,000 years old. But researchers had not been able to determine the oldest possible DNA they could get from the fossil record because DNA's rate of decay had remained a mystery. read more