Poinar earned a BS and MS at Cornell University, and remained there for his doctoral studies, receiving a PhD in biology in 1962.

In 1992 a team consisting of Poinar, his wife entomologist Roberta Poinar, his son Hendrik, and Dr. Raúl J. Cano of California Polytechnic State University successfully extracted insect DNA from a Lebanese weevil in amber that was 125 million years old, collected by Raif Milki in Lebanon.

[1] In 1995, George and Roberta Poinar, a fellow researcher from Berkeley, moved to Oregon, where they opened the Amber Institute.

Named Strychnos electri, after the Greek word for amber (electron), the flowers represent the first-ever fossils of an asterid.

[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.