Pretty much every single person who read or saw Jurassic Park has spent a minute or a month’s worth of hours wondering if (hoping that?) there was any way the blood-in-the-bug-in-the-amber trick could be done in reality, or might inspire a similar real-world scenario.
NEIN. Your favorite existence-defining discipline, science, has just crushed your secret dream. According to Nature (the magazine about nature!), DNA itself has a half-life of only 521 years, and even under the most ideal of conditions for preservation, no viable bits of the building blocks of life could survive longer than about 6.8 million years. That’s a decimal point placement and an order of magnitude short of the age of dinosaurs, roughly 65 million years ago.
So. Precursor to the shrew? Absolutely. Raptors? Sorry, no.
