You must have been watching an older documentary. Shortly before the movie Jurrastic Park came out they were testing with the whole "amber" idea, but found that even encased in Amber, the DNA still deteriorated beyond its usable state.

A month or so ago there was a special on the Discovery channel called Recreating the Dinosaur.

Here's the gist of it: Obtaining the entire strand of dino DNA is nigh impossible, essentially DNA is too fragile to have existed undamaged THAT long. The gaps would be a major guessing game to fill in. Using the 'Jurassic Park' method to extract DNA from a mosquito's blood meal won't work for a number of reasons... one of which is contamination of the sample, second reason is erythrocytes <the bulk of blood cells> don't have DNA too replicate. Ok... so where does that leave us?

I was shocked to see one of my favorite paleontologists, Jack Horner, as one of the driving forces in this... but then I remembered the guy is a pioneer in his field, and he isn't the one doing the actual molecular work. He's a guiding hand on the theories behind it.

What they've ended up working on trying to do is retro-engineer a dinosaur by taking a modern day relative of the dinosaur and stepping the genes backwards. One lab working with mutant chicken embryos discovered one that had pre-teeth structures growing from the beak. These resembled the same structures in croc embryos. So, it seems that the gene for teeth in birds is still there, just usually snicked off. Another scientist was working on chick embryos and discovered that they had long tails that shortened as they grew. This part isn't really a shocker, after all, we have tails as embryos, too. But, what he started to do was push the genes to keep them active longer which was producing the effect of the embryo developing the tail longer and adding vertebrae... Chickens have also been breed to have a form of proto-feather emerge from their legs, as it was believed that many of the Raptor type dinosaurs were covered in feathers. The other trick would be in removing the feather development altogether and produce the scale type skin that birds possess on their legs all over their bodies.

What it boils down to, is that they believe that by trial and error they can eventually produce an animal that looks like a dinosaur by manipulating the genetic memory of the existing descendants. Where they would be short of producing a true dinosaur is that there is more to the creature than form... there is also function. You may be able to walk back the steps of an Emu developing to produce an Emu-saurus with scales, hands, a tale, teeth, and a tail... but it likely will not behave how a dinosaur did. You have a Emu in Dino clothing.

The big benefit in the long run is that scientists are beginning to have a greater understanding of how genes effect development and evolution of structures... but the end result of a 'dino' being produced is not what they'd end up with. We can match the bone structure, but what color are the scales? And heck, if we could step a bird back to a dinosaur... can we step a human back to pre-human? The idea is the same, the memory is likely there. But, like Malcolm says in Jurassic Park, "...too busy thinking that they could to ask if they should!"

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