John Foster (paleontologist)


John Russell Foster is an American paleontologist. Foster has worked with dinosaur remains from the Late Jurassic of the Colorado Plateau and Rocky Mountains, as well as working on Cambrian age trilobite faunas in the southwest region of the American west. He named the crocodiliform trace fossil Hatcherichnus sanjuanensis in 1997 and identified the first known occurrence of the theropod trace fossil Hispanosauropusin North America in 2015.

Career

He is adjunct faculty of geology at Colorado Mesa University, Grand Junction, Colorado.
Since 2014 he has been the Director of the . He served for thirteen years as Curator of Paleontology at the Museums of Western Colorado from 2001 to 2014.

Professional Work

An expert on the Late Jurassic, he has spent more than twenty-five years excavating fossils across the western United States, authoring and coauthoring more than 55 professional papers, ranging from Triassic to Cretaceous, with a few Cambrian and Cenozoic studies appearing as well. In addition to dinosaurs, he has spent over a decade working in the Cambrian shales of the western United States.

Triassic

In December of 2017, he and coauthors Xavier A. Jenkins of Arizona State University and Robert J. Gay of Colorado Canyons Association formally published their study on the oldest known dinosaur from Utah, a neotheropod that is likely an animal similar to Coelophysis.

Jurassic

His researches in the Late Jurassic of the Colorado Plateau and Rocky Mountains includes the geographic and environmental distributions of microvertebrates and dinosaurs. He served as the lead researcher at the Mygatt-Moore Quarry in western Colorado for 14 years, and continues to work in the Late Jurassic of eastern Utah and western Colorado. His current work includes the excavation of the first known dinosaur from the western United States, "Dystrophaeus," on Bureau of Land Management lands in San Juan County, Utah. Foster had a ceratosaurid ceratosaur theropod dinosaur, Fosterovenator, named after him in 2014

Cambrian

His researches in the Cambrian of the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau, includes the study of taphonomy and biostratinomy of trilobites, and what this information indicates about the paleoenvironmental conditions on the shallow shelf of western North American during the early Paleozoic.

Popular Books

Foster is the author of Jurassic West: The Dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation and Their World, followed by his second book Cambrian Ocean World.