John Harold Ostrom (February 18, 1928 – July 16, 2005)	Back     Site Map
	John Harold Ostrom was born in New York on 18th February 1928. He studied geology and biology at Union College in Schenectady and moved to Columbia University in 1951 after being invited by George Gaylord Simpson for whom he was field assistant in New Mexico. Nine years later he achieved a doctorate for his work on hadrosaur cranial anatomy. Ostrom then taught at Brooklyn College in New York City (1955–1956) before joining the faculty at Beloit College in Wisconsin until 1961. It was in this year that Ostrom became assistant professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at Yale University, and assistant curator of vertebrate paleontology at Yale’s Peabody Museum, becoming a full professor and curator ten years later. From 1962 to 1967 John Ostrom's expeditions to the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming and Montana saw the discovery of Deinonychus antirrhopus. Deinonychus was the turning point in Ostrom’s career, his vision of dinosaurs as intelligent, agile and advanced organisms revived the public's interest in vertevrate palaeontology. His work particularly concentrated on Archaeopteryx and the morphological similarities with Birds and Deinonychus, and Ostrom himself is often credited with founding the Ave evolution theory of dinosaurs. The discovery of feathered dinosaurs in China recently refuelled the debate Ostrom revived, stating that the Yixian fossil smark “the biggest event in evolutionary science since Darwin put forth his theory,”. This, at a conference in America attended by over 400 world renowned palaeontologists. Dr. John Ostrom died in Litchfield, Connecticut, on July 16, 2005. References and Further Reading URLs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ostrom http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/horizon/1998/dinogarden.shtml http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/science/story/0,12996,1536641,00.html?gusrc=rss