[jacquesm]

Halflife under normal circumstances. Deepfreezing it is not the usual for DNA. Just like your meat and vegetables are still edible when you freeze them a year later and spoil in a matter of hours or days at higher temperatures.

http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2012/10...

So that's at 13.1 degrees, quote from the end of that paper:

"Our results indicate that short fragments of DNA could be present for a very long time; at –5°C, the model predicts a half-life of 158 000 years for a 30 bp mtDNA fragment in bone (table 1). Even rough estimates such as this imply that sequenceable bone DNA fragments may still be present more than 1 Myr after deposition in deep frozen environments. It therefore seems reasonable to suggest that future research may identify authentic DNA that is significantly older than the current record of approximately 450–800 kyr from Greenlandic ice cores".

So even if they don't have a thermal model where you plug in any temperature and it will give you the half life there is good evidence that lower temperatures significantly increase the chances of DNA remaining intact for much longer than the above-zero half life would suggest.

[Alex3917]

Since (some) nematodes eat poop, could we get viable megafauna DNA this way?

[amphitoky]

just find the poop and get the DNA from there? What does the worm add?

[xevb3k]

That’s very interesting, thanks! I now need to go read more about those 450,000 year old fragments.