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John Harold Ostrom was an American paleontologist who revolutionized modern understanding of dinosaurs in the 1960s.
Ostrom showed that dinosaurs were more like big non-flying birds than they were like lizards. Thomas Henry Huxley in the 1860s had also thought birds evolved from dinosaurs, based on a comparison of Archaeopteryx with Compsognathus. Huxley's idea was later discarded, mainly because Gerhard Heilmann, in 1926, had different views.
The first of Ostrom's broad-based reviews of the osteology and phylogeny of the primitive bird Archaeopteryx appeared in 1976. His reaction to the eventual discovery of feathered dinosaurs in China, after years of acrimonious debate, was bittersweet.
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