PHP中的Oracle Epoch时间戳的Oracle时间戳

I've got an oracle Database with an TIMESTAMP (6) WITH LOCAL TIME ZONE column that returns me values like this:

20-FEB-12 11.41.17.799000 AM

How can i parse those into a normal unix timestamp in PHP?
strtotime() doesn't work (returns false)

I just found i can use TO_CHAR to turn the Timestamp into something more parseable within the database query.

There is a description here: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/fcdb/oracle/or-time.html