Michael Crichton, author of the book that inspired the movie, got the idea from the work of paleobiologist George Poinar, Jr. 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). I was naturally attracted to nature. It started with birds first. When I eventually went to Cornell, I decided I was going to major in ornithology. I started out with Dr. [Charles] Sibley there, and after working with him for a while, we decided that I should take a minor. I moved over and I worked with Dr. [Loren] Petri in botany for a while. And then I had an opportunity to do some summer work with an entomologist. That’s when I first became interested in insects. Every year, more people are reading our articles to learn about the challenges facing the natural world. Our future depends on nature, but we are not doing enough to protect our life support system. Pollution has caused toxic air in our cities, and farming and logging have wreaked havoc on our forests. Climate change is creating deserts and dead zones, and hunting is driving many species to the brink of extinction. This is the first time in Earth's history that a single species - humanity - has brought such disaster upon the natural world. But if we don't look after nature, nature can't look after us. We must act on scientific evidence, we must act together, and we must act now.

The specimen, described in a paper Greenwalt published with museum researchers and entomologist Ralph Harbach today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is trapped in stone, not amber, and (unfortunately for Jurassic Park enthusiasts) it’s not old enough to be filled with dinosaur blood. But it is the first time we’ve found a fossilized mosquito with blood in its belly. This cookie, set by YouTube, registers a unique ID to store data on what videos from YouTube the user has seen.

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. George Poinar, Jr. holding a Meerschaum pipe with an amber stem. Photo by Roberta Poinar If dinosaur DNA were found, what happens next? If you work at Jurassic Park's genetic engineering facility you simply combine it with frog DNA and recreate an extinct reptile. When under specific circumstances blood does preserve, it doesn't mean that scientists will find DNA in it. So even if a dinosaur's blood was found inside an ancient insect, an opportunity to recreate the reptile from it isn't guaranteed. From what I gather, from what Michael Crichton said, he had written Jurassic Park, but he hadn’t decided how he was going to get the dinosaur DNA, and when he read the paper [on the fly in Baltic amber], this gave him the idea that he would obtain it from mosquitoes that bit the dinosaurs. Assisted Model Building with Energy Refinement ( AMBER) is a family of force fields for molecular dynamics of biomolecules originally developed by Peter Kollman's group at the University of California, San Francisco.

VigLink sets this cookie to show users relevant advertisements and also limit the number of adverts that are shown to them. The JSESSIONID cookie is used by New Relic to store a session identifier so that New Relic can monitor session counts for an application. NID cookie, set by Google, is used for advertising purposes; to limit the number of times the user sees an ad, to mute unwanted ads, and to measure the effectiveness of ads. This cookie is used for load balancing purposes. The cookie does not store any personally identifiable data.Now that the team has found that it is technically possible to extract DNA from resin, the next steps are to analyze gradually older samples, using more sensitive sequencing methods, to determine just how long DNA could last. After all, there’s quite a window between two years and 100 million. 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. 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. Enter Greenwalt, who began volunteering at the museum in 2006, cataloging specimens for the paleobiology department. In 2008, he embarked on his own project of collecting fossils from the Kishenehn every summer, in part because he’d read in an insect evolution textbook an offhand mention of Constenius’ discoveries, which had never been rigorously described in the scientific literature. In the 20 years since the movie Jurassic Park fantasized about how dinosaurs could be cloned from blood found in ancient amber-trapped mosquitoes, fossil collectors have been on the hunt for a similar specimen. Over the years, a few different groups of scientists have claimed to find a fossilized mosquito with ancient blood trapped in its abdomen, but each of these teams’ discoveries, in turn, turned out to be the result of error or contamination.

My wife was an electron microscopist then at Berkeley, working in the same department, and I decided to see whether there might be some tissue remaining [in specimens trapped in amber]. So she sectioned one of the specimens that we had—a fly in Baltic amber—and discovered then that yes, the preservative qualities of amber were so great that they actually preserved intact cell organelles, such as nuclei, lipids, mitochondria, and things like that. That was probably one of the most exciting projects I ever worked on, to make that discovery along with my wife, Roberta. In Jurassic Park, they say that they found fragmented DNA. They identified where the holes are and filled them with frog DNA. But the problem is that you don't know where the holes are if you don't have the whole genome,' explains Susie. This means that even if we miraculously had some DNA of the ancient creature, there are currently a ton of technical problems that prevent the cloning similar to that in Jurassic Park from becoming a reality. Assembling a full genome from DNA fragments requires us to have an understanding of what the whole genome looks like (which we don’t have in this case), and turning that into a living, breathing animal would necessitate putting that DNA into an ovum of a living species very closely related to the mystery creature that we don’t know in the first place. But DNA is vulnerable and breaks down rapidly. Sunlight has negative effects and water can also accelerate deterioration. Modern contamination is also a problem. DNA has to be handled under strictly controlled conditions.I very much liked the books of Robert Desowitz. He was a tropical parasitologist, and he wrote a number of popular books explaining to the public about diseases—the evolution, and things like that. His books were very interesting and well written, and I always had high regard for him. But of course, real life doesn’t quite work like that. There’s ongoing scientific debate about just how long DNA can last in various forms. Controversial studies claim to have detected DNA in 75-million-year-old dinosaur fossils, but all too often these later turn out to be contamination from much more recent samples.

After Greenwalt met the Constenius family in Whitefish and described his work, they decided to donate their fossil collection to the museum. When he began cataloging the boxes the fossils and came across this particular specimen, “I immediately noticed it—it was obvious that it was different,” he says. He suspected that the mosquito’s darkly opaque abdomen, trapped in a thin piece of shale, might contain 46-million-year old blood.

What led to your discovery that cell organelles could be preserved in specimens ensconced in amber? This cookie is set by the provider Akamai Bot Manager. This cookie is used to manage the interaction with the online bots. It also helps in fraud preventions A cookie set by YouTube to measure bandwidth that determines whether the user gets the new or old player interface. Currently the oldest DNA to have been found is around one million years old, although it is possibly younger. DNA 66 times older would have to be found to get to the age of dinosaurs. How to make dinosaur DNA The term AMBER force field generally refers to the functional form used by the family of AMBER force fields. This form includes several parameters; each member of the family of AMBER force fields provides values for these parameters and has its own name.