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Revision as of 19:09, 21 January 2005 by Wetman (talk | contribs)(diff) ← Previous revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)John Ostrom (born 1928), is the paleontologist who revolutionized modern understanding of dinosaurs in the 1960s, when he demonstrated that dinosaurs are more like big non-flying birds than they are like lizards, an idea first proposed by Thomas Henry Huxley in the 1860s, but which had garnered few supporters. The first of Ostrom's broad-based reviews of the osteology and phylogeny of the primitive bird Archaeopteryx appeared in 1975. His reaction to the eventual discovery of feathered dinosaurs, after years of acrimonoius debate, was bittersweet ("At Last, His Theory Flies" by Olivia F. Gentile, Hartford Courant, May 5, 2000). Ostrom's reading of fossilized hadrosaur trackways led him to the conclusion that these duckbilled dinosaurs travelled in herds.
Ostrom is a professor at Yale University where he has long been the curator of the Peabody Museum of Natural History.
One of the famous discoveries in which he had a part was Deinonychus. One of his famous students is Robert T. Bakker.