Helix books
1 total work
The dinosaurs of "Jurassic Park" are an imaginative leap from the ancient bee and its 40-million-year-old preserved DNA that George and Roberta Poinar discovered in 1991. Here they describe in detail the miracle and beauty of the preserved invertebrates they found, frozen forever in their everyday tasks - worker ants carrying food, bees with outstretched wings carrying pollen, flies mating - in the mummification process that tree sap provides. In passages that read more like an Indiana Jones screenplay than a story about scientific research, the Poinars describe how what began as a hobby grew into a semi obsession which ultimately led to a breakthrough scientific discovery. Along the way they encounter all manner of unusual characters, from threatening black marketeers and gun-toting guerrillas to talented scientists, and, of course, the luminously beautiful specimens captured in the still-life of amber.