molecular paleontology

Molecular paleontology is the recovery of DNA from ancient human, animal, and plant.

It remains is an innovative research field that has received progressively more attention from the scientific community since the 1980s. In the last decade, the field was punctuated by claims which aroused great interest but eventually turned out to be fakes—the most famous being the sequence of dinosaur DNA later shown to be of human origin. At present, the discipline is characterized by some certainties and many doubts.

References

 Marota I, Rollo F. Molecular paleontology. Cell Mol Life Sci. 2002 Jan;59(1):97-111. PMID: 11846037