You could find liquid bone marrow but I suspect the half-life of DNA itself means we'll never get anything useful out of it. It doesn't have to be dry to degrade.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/article/700000-year-old-hors...
I'll let you do the math on how much would remain if we had 1 million tons of horse DNA with a 500 year half life. I'll even let you assume we have 1 trillion tons of horse DNA.
I know that feeling, my man. My shelves are covered in Jurassic Park memorabilia too. It's just not going to happen, though.
The 521 years is just the half-life they estimated for their samples. Those are the empirical results, so it makes sense to highlight those in the title, as opposed to estimates from their model.
I don't mean to be rude, but please read the fine manuscript. It's open access, so you don't need to pay
And, no you are not being rude. But since you seem to have read the article, can you give me a few pointers why you think it's a good investment of someone else's time to go ahead and read it too? And don't be shy to use Machine Learning or Statistics jargon, we are on Hacker News here, everyone understands concepts like in-sample, out-of-sample, goodness of fit, overfitting and such.
It's worth remembering that the half-life paper dealt with samples that had "an effective burial temperature of 13.1°C", while the horse sample was obtained from the permafrost. The half-life paper even talks about DNA obtained from ice-core samples in that age-range:
> The rate of depurination is influenced by temperature, among other factors, which explains why the most extreme survival of DNA was documented in approximately 450–800 kyr ice cores.
And if you look at Table 1 in the half-life paper, you'll find estimated half-lifes for a range of temperatures, with an estimated half-life of 9.5k years for a 500bp DNA fragment at -5C and 47k years for a shorter 100bp fragment at the same temperature:
> Still, the results indicate that under the right conditions of preservation, short fragments of DNA should be retrievable from very old bone (e.g. greater than 1 Myr).
The horse paper also cites the half-life paper, but not as a refutation.