The discovery of ‘terrible claw’

In the summer of 1964 John Ostrom was prospecting for fossils
in Cretaceous rocks near Bridger, Montana, and collected the
fragmentary remains of a new and unusual predatory dinosaur.
Further collecting yielded more complete remains, and by 1969
Ostrom was able to describe the new dinosaur in sufficient detail
and to christen it Deinonychus (‘terrible claw’) in recognition of
a wickedly hooked, gaff-like claw on its hind foot.
Deinonychus (Figure 16) was a medium-sized (2–3 metres in
length), predatory dinosaur belonging to a group known as the
theropods. Ostrom noted a number of unexpected anatomical
features; these prepared the intellectual ground for a revolution
that would shatter the then rather firmly held view of dinosaurs
as archaic and outmoded creatures that plodded their way to
extinction at the close of the Mesozoic world.
However, Ostrom was far more interested in understanding the
biology of this puzzling animal than in simply listing its skeletal
features. This approach is far removed from the pejorative epithet
‘stamp-collecting’ that palaeontology had attracted, and echoes the
method of Louis Dollo in his earlier attempts to understand the
biology of the first complete Iguanodon skeletons (Chapter 1). As an approach, it has more in common with modern forensic pathology,
driven as it is by a need to assemble broad ranges of facts from a
number of different scientific areas in order to arrive at rigorous
interpretation, or hypothesis, on the basis of the available evidence;
this is one of several driving forces behind today’s palaeobiology.