30 Facts About John Ostrom

John Harold Ostrom was an American paleontologist who revolutionized the modern understanding of dinosaurs.

John Ostrom argued that Deinonychus, a small two-legged carnivore, would have been fast-moving and warm-blooded.

Further, John Ostrom's work made zoologists question whether birds should be considered an order of Reptilia instead of their own class, Aves.

John Ostrom showed more bird-like traits common in dinosaurs and proved that birds themselves are coelurosaurian theropod dinosaurs.

The first of John Ostrom's broad-based reviews of the osteology and phylogeny of the primitive bird Archaeopteryx appeared in 1976.

John Ostrom lived to see the eventual discovery of feathered dinosaurs in northeastern China, confirming his theories about dinosaurs being progenitors of birds, and the existence of dinosaurs with feathered plumage.

John Ostrom was born in New York on February 18,1928 and grew up in Schenectady.

John Ostrom earned his bachelor's degree in biology and geology from Union College in 1951.

John Ostrom enrolled at Columbia University as a graduate student with Ned Colbert as his advisor.

In 1951 Simpson invited John Ostrom to spend the summer as a field assistant in the San Juan Basin of New Mexico.

John Ostrom worked as a research assistant with Colbert, who was the Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, John Ostrom earned his doctorate in geology in 1960 with a thesis on North American hadrosaurs that was based on the skull collection housed at the AMNH.

John Ostrom taught for one year at Brooklyn College in 1955 before joining the faculty at Beloit College the following year.

John Ostrom worked in the Cloverly Formation Site in Montana and Wyoming from 1962 to 1966.

John Ostrom discovered and named Tenontosaurus fossils from the Cloverly Formation.

John Ostrom edited the American Journal of Science, published over a dozen books for both scientific and lay audiences.

John Ostrom was the recipient of numerous awards and honors.

John Ostrom recommended 20 sites for designation and protection as NNLs, of which 13 became designated landmarks.

In 1969, John Ostrom surveyed over 60 bridges to find the missing blocks.

John Ostrom officially retired from Yale in 1992, but continued to write and research as a professor emeritus until his health failed.

John Ostrom died from complications of Alzheimer's disease in July 2005 at the age of 77 in Litchfield, Connecticut.

John Ostrom speculated in a subsequent paper that hadrosaurs had need for such an acute sense of smell as a defense against larger carnivorous dinosaurs, of which the hadrosaur body plan had little in the way of armor and speed.

John Ostrom mapped the site, identifying preserved dinosaur tracks in the sandstone beds of various sizes and species.

John Ostrom's reading of fossilized Hadrosaurus trackways led him to the conclusion that these duckbilled dinosaurs were gregarious and traveled in herds.

John Ostrom worked in the Cloverly Formation Site in Montana and Wyoming from 1962 to 1966.

John Ostrom concluded that at least some dinosaurs had a high metabolism and were in some cases warm-blooded.

At the first North American Paleontological Convention, held at the Chicago Field Museum in 1969, John Ostrom spoke out against the accepted wisdom that Mesozoic climates were universally tropical and that such warm climates would be necessary to sustain large animals with lizard-like metabolisms.

John Ostrom supported this view by noting the correlation of erect posture and locomotion with high metabolism and body temperature in modern mammals and birds, stating that this relationship cannot be accidental.

John Ostrom suggested that dinosaurs, far from becoming extinct, had evolved into a wide variety of descendants in the form of birds.

John Ostrom's work led to a revolution in the classification of fossils and the understanding of dinosaur-bird lineages.

In considering the possible evolution of flight, John Ostrom theorized that birds might have evolved the ability for powered flight as a result of cursorial, or ground-upward movement such as leaping up to capture prey.