John Harold Ostrom (b. February 18, 1928, d. July 16, 2005) was
born in New York, NY. He received his bachelor of science degree in
geology and biology from Union College in Schenectady, NY, in 1951,
when he was invited to Columbia University by George Gaylord Simpson
and spent that summer as Simpson’s field assistant in the San Juan
Basin of New Mexico. In 1960 he earned his doctorate in geology
(vertebrate paleontology) from Columbia. Influenced by Edwin H. Colbert
at the American Museum of Natural History, where he was a research
assistant from 1951 through 1956, Ostrom’s dissertation (published as a
Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History in 1961) was
a comparative functional morphological study of the cranial anatomy of
hadrosaurs (duck-billed dinosaurs). Ostrom taught at Brooklyn College
in New York City (1955–1956) and served as staff geologist with the New
York State Geological Survey and the American Museum of Natural History
before joining the faculty at Beloit College in Wisconsin (1956–1961).
In 1961 Ostrom came to Yale University as assistant professor in its
Department of Geology and Geophysics, and assistant curator of
vertebrate paleontology at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History,
becoming a full professor and curator in 1971. At the Peabody Ostrom’s
curatorship included the extraordinary collection of horned dinosaurs
that are the legacy of O.C. Marsh, Richard Swann Lull and John Bell Hatcher,
and he published several important papers on this group. Functional
morphology and dinosaurs were central to Ostrom’s research throughout
his career, and his publications have been influential in redefining
the paleobiology and paleoecology of several groups.
Ostrom’s field projects in the 1960s produced research that would
change long-held concepts in paleontology. From 1962 to 1967 Ostrom’s
expeditions to the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming and Montana resulted in the
discovery and description of a new dinosaur fauna from a poorly
represented geologic period, including his now well-known description
of Deinonychus antirrhopus (Postilla 128, Bulletin
30, 35). This work, along with the work of Ostrom’s former student
Robert Bakker, redefined commonly held ideas about dinosaur evolution —
both in the academic community and in the public mind — from that of
plodding, cold-blooded reptiles to the intelligent, agile and
gregarious ancestors of modern birds. Ostrom’s critique of dinosaurs as
indicators of paleoclimate (presented at the first North American
Paleontological Convention in Chicago in 1969) and his 1970
reidentification of the Haarlem specimen of Archaeopteryx, in which he recognized osteological similarities to Deinonychus and other small theropods, led to a renaissance in the study of dinosaurs and the evolution of flight.
Ostrom served as acting director of the Yale Peabody Museum from 1975
to 1976, as president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology from
1969 to 1970, and as editor of the Society’s bulletin from 1963 to
1973. He was also editor of the American Journal of Science and the Yale Peabody Museum’s Postilla and Bulletin
series. His many awards and honors included a John Simon Guggenheim
fellowship (1966–1967), the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung in Germany
(1976–1977 and 1985), the prestigious Hayden Memorial Geological Award
(1986) of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia for
outstanding contributions in research and education in paleontology,
and the Yale Peabody Museum’s Addison Emery Verrill Medal (1999).
In
1999 Yale University presented an international symposium in Ostrom’s
honor on the origin and early evolution of birds attended by over 400
paleontologists and others from around the world. The conference was
held in conjunction with the special exhibition China’s Feathered Dinosaurs
at the Yale Peabody Museum, which brought to the northeastern United
States the first viewing of the spectacular 120-million-year-old
fossils of feathered theropods discovered in the Yixian Formation of
Liaoning Province. These finds constitute, according to Ostrom, “the
biggest event in evolutionary science since Darwin put forth his
theory,” and provide compelling evidence that birds evolved from
dinosaurs, an idea that Ostrom reintroduced 40 years earlier.
Dr. John Ostrom was married to Nancy Hartman and had 2 children. Dr.
Ostrom passed away in Litchfield, Connecticut, on July 16, 2005.