George Poinar Jr.
George O. Poinar Jr. | |
---|---|
entomologist | |
Institutions | University of California, Berkeley Oregon State University |
George O. Poinar Jr. (born April 25, 1936) is an American
Poinar earned a BS and MS at Cornell University, and remained there for his doctoral studies, receiving a PhD in biology in 1962. He spent many of his years of research at University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Entomology, Division of Insect Pathology. There, and during travels around the globe, he performed research on the axenic culture of nematodes, nematode parasites of insects and the fossil records of insects and nematodes in amber.
In 1992 a team consisting of Poinar, his wife entomologist
In 1995, George and Roberta Poinar, a fellow researcher from Berkeley, moved to Oregon, where they opened the Amber Institute. Upon his move to Oregon he received a courtesy appointment to the Department of Entomology of Oregon State University.
In 2016, Poinar announced the discovery of a new plant species that is a 45-million-year-old relative of coffee he found in amber. Named
In 2017, Poinar published a paper describing a fossilized flower and its tentative pollinator.[3] The paper describes a flower of an ancestral milkweed plant, which was named Discoflorus neotropicus, and a termite carrying a pollinium, all covered in Dominican amber.
Poinar's son, Hendrik Poinar, is a genetics researcher in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University.[4]
Publications
- Life in Amber (1992), a summary of the varied forms of insect and other life found in amber
- Amplification and sequencing of DNA from a 120-135-million-year-old weevil (1993)
- The Quest for Life in Amber (1994)
- The Amber Forest: A Reconstruction of a Vanished World (1999), co-authored with Roberta Poinar
- Lebanese Amber: The Oldest Insect Ecosystem in Fossilized Resin, co-authored with Raif Milki who collected the amber samples in Lebanon (2001)
See also
References
- PMID 15866038.
- ^ "Prehistoric Coffee Ancestor Found in Amber". discovery.com. February 16, 2016.
- .
- ^ Poinar, Jr (and Poinar), George (and Roberta) (2008). What Bugged the Dinosaurs?: Insects, disease, and death in the Cretaceous. Princeton University Press.
External links
- The Amber Institute
- National Geographic article on Dr. Poinar's discovery of 100 million year old Bee
- MSNBC article on Dr. Poinar's discovery of 100 million year old Bee
- George Poinar Oral History Interview