A drawing of Deinonychus by Robert Bakker ’67, which appeared in Ostram’s original paper describing the dinosaur.
SciTechDaily has an interesting story about how the discovery of Deinonychus changed our view of dinosaurs. John Ostrom found the first Deinonychus back in 1960's. In 1969, he published a paper describing Deinonychus, which means "terrible claw". That paper raised many questions about current assumptions about dinosaurs and refueled the debate on which animals birds evolved from.
Academics used to tease paleontologists, saying that while dinosaurs appeal to children, they won’t answer the important evolutionary questions.
Yale’s John Ostrom (1928-2005) proved them wrong.
Fifty years ago, in Feb. 1969, Ostrom, then an assistant professor of geology and geophysics at Yale, published a paper describing a previously unknown dinosaur he dubbed Deinonychus, meaning “terrible claw” in Greek. The paper reignited public interest in dinosaurs and upended common assumptions in the field. It also helped answer the question: Where do birds come from?
As an undergraduate student at Union College Ostrom was captivated by the works of George Gaylord Simpson, a paleontologist-turned-evolutionary biologist. Ostrom decided against entering medicine as his father had hoped, and instead pursued a Ph.D. at Columbia University to study with Simpson. In 1961, Ostrom joined Yale’s Department of Geology and Geophysics, and he remained there until his retirement in 1993, though he remained active in research and writing as an emeritus professor at Yale until 2001.
The name Deinonychus may not be familiar to non-scientists, but millions of people have seen one on the big screen. In the 1993 film “Jurassic Park” the murderous Velociraptors were, in fact, based on Deinonychus. (Real velociraptors were considerably smaller than the creatures in the film, about the same size as a turkey.)
