And then I had an opportunity to do some summer work with an entomologist. Sibley there, and after working with him for a while, we decided that I should take a minor. When I eventually went to Cornell, I decided I was going to major in ornithology. But as I grew older, I eventually rebelled against it. When I was 5 years old, I was practicing an hour a day on the violin and the piano, taking lessons. That’s a long story, because my father was a musician, and he wanted me to be a musician also. How did you first get interested in entomology? holding a Meerschaum pipe with an amber stem. Science Friday recently spoke with Poinar, 79, now a courtesy professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at Oregon State University, about what led him to investigate specimens trapped in amber, his thoughts on de-extinction, and his inspirations. And just this past February, he co-authored a paper in Nature Plants describing a new species of neotropical flower found in amber from the mid-Tertiary Period. That work led to a lifelong obsession with amber, in which Poinar would find, among other specimens, the oldest known bee, the first known bat fly fossil, and the most complete flower from the Cretaceous Period. In 1982, when he was a professor of invertebrate pathology (within the Department of Entomology) at UC Berkeley, Poinar and his electron-microscopist wife published a study describing their discovery that amber could preserve intracellular structures, such as nuclei and mitochondria, in an organism trapped inside (in this case, a type of fly). Michael Crichton, author of the book that inspired the movie, got the idea from the work of paleobiologist George Poinar, Jr. DNA”-explaining how the film’s scientists were able to extract dinosaur blood from an ancient mosquito, isolate dinosaur DNA, and in turn, create new, living dinos. If you’ve watched the original Jurassic Park movie, you’ll remember this scene of a cartoon character-“Mr.
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