John Foster

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.

He is adjunct faculty of geology at Colorado Mesa University, Grand Junction, Colorado. Since 2014 he has been 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.

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

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, 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.