A federal court has dismissed a private salvage company’s claim to half of a treasure potentially worth billions of dollars and believed to lie in the wreck of a Spanish galleon that sank 300 years ago off Colombia’s coast.

In a ruling issued Monday, U.S. District Court Judge James E. Boasberg indicated that the statute of limitations had expired on a breach-of-contract claim by the American company Sea Search Armada and noted that “no specific money judgment exists to be enforced.”