A window to the ancient past

[img_inline align=”right” src=”http://padnws01.mcmaster.ca/images/Hendrik’s_Dad_cropped.jpg” caption=”George Poinar, world-renowned amber expert and entomologist”]Flip open the best-selling novel Jurassic Park and you'll find his name listed in the acknowledgements. George Poinar, world-renowned amber expert and entomologist, has spent decades collecting and researching the precious stone that preserves the fossils of the ancient past.

Poinar, a professor emeritus at Oregon State University, pioneered research to extract ancient DNA from insects trapped millions of years ago in the tree resin that eventually forms into amber.

Poinar's research attracted the attention of novelist Michael Crichton and became the basis for the blockbuster novel and movie, Jurassic Park.

George Poinar's son Hendrik Poinar, a geneticist and bioanthropologist in McMaster's departments of anthropology and pathology and molecular medicine, remembers director Steven Spielberg visiting his father's lab at Berkeley.

“Spielberg was unimpressed with my dad's lab  he found it dry and boring and was hoping for something more high-tech for his movie. The set he eventually used for Jurassic Park was remade out of Styrofoam and while it looked amazing, it didn't look like the lab my father used for his research,” says his son Hendrik.

Hendrik Poinar traces his own interest in science to his early exposure to his father's research, accompanying his parents on their research expeditions. In 1992 Hendrik worked with his father's research team to extract DNA from a Lebanese weevil in amber 125 million years old.

George Poinar's lecture, Insects in Amber, will explore his studies of insects preserved by ancient amber and the discovery that insects were transmitting diseases 100 million years ago.

Join George Poinar on Monday, Nov. 8 at 7 p.m. in MUSC 319 (CIBC Banquet Hall) to hear about some of the scientific discoveries he has made in pursuit of this precious fossilized stone and for a glimpse into the window of the ancient past that amber provides us.

The lecture is free and all are welcome. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the lecture begins at 7:00 p.m.