John H. Ostrom

From EvoWiki

John H. Ostrom, of Yale, was one of the most influential figures in 20th Century dinosaur paleontology. It is no exaggeration to say that he single-handedly resurrected the theropod origin of birds with his 1964 discovery of Deinonychus antirrhopus from the Lower Cretaceous Cloverly Formation of Wyoming in 1964, and the subsequent description of this marvelous predator in a truly gorgeous 1969 monograph. Ostrom carried out the most extensive review of the Archaeopteryx material that perhaps has ever been executed, and was intimately involved with the discovery of two previously misidentified urvogel remains (see my primer on Archaeopteryx). It is Ostrom's work that the post-modernist consensus on theropod phylogeny and avian origins, is largely indebted to, a fact reflected in the 1999 symposium on those very subjects, held in honor of Ostrom. Moreover, Ostrom had a crucial influence on a generation of dinosaur paleontologists, including most notably, his former student Robert Bakker. In addition, Ostrom is largely responsible for the primacy of paleobiological thought in modern dinosaur paleontology.