Those anxiously awaiting their own micro-triceratops would have been disappointed by last night’s NOVA about fossils preserved in amber.

While animals more than 100 million years old have been preserved in amber, it is not clear that extremely old DNA has ever been successfully extracted from this source. Worse, for those with Jurassic Park dreams, a scientist asserts that getting a complete genome from amber is “absolutely impossible,” as preserved DNA is highly fragmented.

However, the show did not examine what could be learned from fragmented DNA, or whether future techniques might enable information to be gleaned from it.