You might want to add "prehistoric" to the title as well, just to make it extra clear that birds don't count

Would something engineered to have be very similar to a dinosaur count, or do we actually need to get a dinosaur's mostly intact DNA?

The DNA needs to be similar enough that biologists would classify it genetically as a dinosaur. It doesn't need to be an exact clone of an original dinosaur's DNA; it could also be some sort of reconstruction that gets close. But it can't be, say, a silicon-based life form that looks and behaves exactly like a T-rex.

@IsaacKing I am more thinking what if we take existing avian genomes, make edits to it until we get a Tyrannosaur phenotype, but there's no ground truth available for whether this is close to an actual Tyrannosaur genome. Or, more generally: is there any way for this to resolve YES without us recovering a mostly-intact dinosaur genome?

@vluzko Sorry, I never responded to this. That would count.

This is so disappointing.