Legendary Popularity

The reason John Ostrom is well known is because his revival of Victorian era musings of dinosaurian warm-bloodedness and his hypothesis of the dinosaur-bird evolutionary link. Ostrom's work on trackways and inferred behavior is understated and mostly forgotten by the world at large, but is preserved regardless in the wider realm of the Dinosaur Renaissance of the later 20th century. The hypotheses that are now accepted and supported theories of the paleontology world are a living legacy by which Ostrom should always be remembered. However, Ostrom's contributions are in danger of being eclipsed by the memory of his student who championed those causes into the modern era of paleontology and, literally, wrote the book examining those hypotheses further (extending Ostrom's hypotheses and augmenting them with his and other's work). Hopefully the memory of Ostrom's contributions to the Dinosaur Renaissance will be remembered into the distant future along the lines of other American greats like Cope, Marsh, and Brown (not to mention the worldwide recognition possible).