Comment by michaelgreshko

Hey, I'm the journalist who wrote the story. A few things: - The organic-rich film preserving the outlines of scales (so, yes, fossilized skin) is only a few millimeters thick. So Mitchell had to prepare the fossil extremely slowly in order to follow the film through the matrix. - The half-life of DNA is ~521 years at 13.1°C, as found in this 2012 paper: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/279/1748/4724 The team's model predicts higher half-lifes at truly freezing temperatures, but even at the extreme end, there's no way DNA would survive 110 million years. - The dating on the site is well constrained to ~110 million years old. The fossil was found in the Wabiskaw Member of the Clearwater Formation, a well-dated rock formation in Alberta. The underlying oil sands have been radiometrically dated to 112±5.3 million years old. (http://science.sciencemag.org/content/308/5726/1293)