George and Roberta Poinar
Authors of What Bugged the Dinosaurs (Princeton)
Read the review here.
My wife and I have been avid readers all our lives and writing scientific papers has always been an important part of our careers. I published my first paper in 1959, while still a graduate student at Cornell and Roberta’s name first appeared in print in 1967. Collectively we have published more than 600 scientific works. I have written 7 technical books and Roberta and I have collaborated on 3 popular books on amber, including the latest one, “What Bugged the Dinosaurs?” After writing so many technical works, we have found that trying to write about science for the general public is difficult. In fact, the greatest obstacle we had to overcome in writing “What Bugged the Dinosaurs?” was balancing scientific facts with a presentation that would appeal to all readers.
My fascination with amber and its inclusions began as a boy, however I didn’t begin actually collecting and studying it until 1962. Our joint work on amber insects started in early 1970 at the University of California, Berkeley. An integral part of our research involved traveling around the world in search of amber fossils. Adventures encountered during these excursions were described in “The Quest for Life in Amber”. Then, after decades of carefully examining amber fossils we had collected in the Dominican Republic, plus specimens obtained from various dealers, we were able to reconstruct the type of amber forest that existed there some 20-40 million years ago as described in our second book “The Amber Forest- A Reconstruction of a Vanished World”.
All the time we were collecting and studying amber, we were consumed with an intense desire to examine even older material, especially amber that had formed during the period of the dinosaurs. Perhaps then we would be able to tell how the entombed insects interacted with dinosaurs. While we had examined Cretaceous amber in the late 1970s, it wasn’t until in 1993 that we had an opportunity to visit the Late Cretaceous amber deposits in Alberta, Canada and also to examine Early Cretaceous amber from Lebanon. The idea for “What Bugged the Dinosaurs?” was born in April of that same year when we set up an amber exhibit with the same title at UC Berkeley and a similar titled display for an amber Museum in the Dominican Republic the following year. However, the final incentive to write this book came in 2001, when a new amber mine opened in Myanmar (Burma). This Cretaceous amber contained some of the most striking fossils ever recovered and after studying specimens from this and other Cretaceous sites for more than 28 years, we were ready to begin writing “What Bugged the Dinosaurs? “ This did not turn out to be a simple endeavor since it meant spending months going over the extensive literature on the flora and fauna (including dinosaurs) of the Cretaceous. At times, the task seemed overwhelming but perseverance and a consuming passion about the subject always directed us back to the drawing board until after two long years, the book was completed.
