Otto Heinrich Schindewolf was a German paleontologist, known for his research on corals and cephalopods. He was born June 7, 1896, in Hanover, Germany and died June 10, 1971, in Tübingen, West Germany.

Schindewolf was on the faculty at the University of Marburg from 1919 until 1927. He then he became director of the Geological Survey of Berlin . In 1948 he became a professor at the University of Tübingen, where he retired as professor emeritus in 1964.

He has been associated with the Hopeful Monster theory of evolution proposed by Richard Goldschmidt. Because of the lack of transitional fossils in the fossil record, he adopted a saltationist position, and proposed that evolution proceeded with large leaps between species. As an example he suggested that perhaps a reptile laid an egg and a bird hatched out of it. Goldschmidt thought his example was plausible.

His Basic Questions in Paleontology was published in German in 1950, and was a landmark work in the field of paleontology and evolution.