Ostrom, John

John Ostrom, in full John Harold Ostrom, (born Feb. 18, 1928, New York, N.Y., U.S.—died July 16, 2005, Litchfield, Conn.), American paleontologist who popularized the theory that many species of dinosaurs were warm-blooded and ancestrally linked to birds.

Ostrom was raised in Schenectady, N.Y., where he later attended Union College, intending to follow his father into medicine. However, upon reading the work of American paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson and initiating a correspondence with him, he instead decided to pursue his interest in evolution. After earning a bachelor’s degree (1951) in geology and biology, Ostrom enrolled at Columbia University, New York, having served as Simpson’s field assistant the previous summer. He was a research assistant at the American Museum of Natural History (1951–56) and taught at Brooklyn College in New York (1955–56) and Beloit College in Wisconsin (1956–61). After receiving a doctorate in vertebrate paleontology (1961) from Columbia, he was hired as an assistant professor of geology at Yale University (1961) and assistant curator of vertebrate paleontology at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History (1961). He was made full professor and curator in 1971.

While conducting fieldwork in the Bighorn Basin of Montana in 1964, Ostrom found a fossilized claw that he determined to have belonged to a predatory dinosaur that lived more than 125 million years ago. He named the dinosaur Deinonychus (Greek for “terrible claw”); this was the creature that was erroneously referred to as a Velociraptor in the popular book Jurassic Park (1991; filmed 1993). The functional morphology of the dinosaur (species Deinonychus antirrhopus) implied an upright posture and actively predacious habits at odds with the perception that dinosaurs were cold-blooded and sluggish. Ostrom later concluded that the creature must have been warm-blooded, reviving an idea posited during the early days of paleontology and thereby revolutionizing the field.

In 1970, while reviewing fossil specimens at a museum in the Netherlands, Ostrom determined that a specimen previously thought to be a pterosaur was in fact a member of the genus Archaeopteryx, which had characteristics of both birds and dinosaurs. He discerned structural parallels between Archaeopteryx and Deinonychus, leading him to assert in 1973 that birds had evolved from theropod dinosaurs, the group to which Deinonychus belonged. His discovery reenergized the theory linking dinosaurs to birds and sparked Ostrom’s own research into the evolution of birds and their flight.

Ostrom was also editor of the American Journal of Science (1968–97). He became emeritus at Yale in 1992.