John Foster (paleontologist)

John Russell Foster (born November 3, 1966) is an American paleontologist. Foster has worked with dinosaur remains from the Late Jurassic of the Colorado Plateau and Rocky Mountains, Foster is also working on Cambrian age trilobite faunas in the southwest region of the American west. He named the crocodyliform trace fossil Hatcherichnus sanjuanensis in 1997 and identified the first known occurrence of the theropod trace fossil Hispanosauropus in North America in 2015.

Career

 * Born November 3, 1966, San Diego, California.
 * High School, Los Gatos High School, Los Gatos, California. 1985
 * A.B. Geology, Occidental College, Los Angeles, California. 1989
 * M.S. Paleontology, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, Rapid City, South Dakota. 1993
 * Ph.D. University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado. 1998

He is adjunct faculty of geology at Colorado Mesa University, Grand Junction, Colorado. From 2014 to 2018 he was the Director of the Museum of Moab. He served for thirteen years as Curator of Paleontology at the Museums of Western Colorado from 2001 to 2014. He is currently a curator at the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum in Vernal, Utah.

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 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.