John Foster

John Foster is a paleontologist at the Utah Field House of Natural History State Park Museum in Vernal, Utah. He grew up in California obsessed with sharks and space and only discovered paleontology in college because as a geology major at Occidental College he could not stop looking for trilobites while assigned field mapping class projects in the Mojave Desert. This diverted him from marine biology and geology into invertebrate and then vertebrate paleontology in graduate school at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and then the University of Colorado. His main research interests are in the Cambrian and Jurassic periods of Earth history. He has worked on paleontological projects in Cambrian rocks of the western United States from Arizona up to Idaho and Wyoming, but especially in California, Nevada, and Utah. He began working in the Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation in the Black Hills in 1991 and has conducted fieldwork in the formation for nearly 30 field seasons at quarries in Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, and South Dakota.