Some of the largest animals to ever walk on Earth were the long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs known as the sauropods—and the most famous of these giants is probably Brontosaurus, the "thunder lizard." Deeply rooted as this titan is in the popular imagination, however, for more than a century scientists thought it never existed.
The first of the Brontosaurus genus was named in 1879 by famed paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. The specimen still stands on display in the Great Hall of Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History. In 1903, however, paleontologist Elmer Riggs found that Brontosaurus was apparently the same as the genus Apatosaurus, which Marsh had first described in 1877. In such cases the rules of scientific nomenclature state that the oldest name has priority, dooming Brontosaurus to another extinction.
Now a new study suggests resurrecting Brontosaurus. It turns out the original Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus fossils appear different enough to belong to separate groups after all. "Generally, Brontosaurus can be distinguished from Apatosaurus most easily by its neck, which is higher and less wide," says lead study author Emanuel Tschopp, a vertebrate paleontologist at the New University of Lisbon in Portugal. "So although both are very massive and robust animals, Apatosaurus is even more extreme than Brontosaurus"(Choi 2015).
brontosaurus, (genus Brontosaurus), genus of large herbivorous sauropod dinosaurs living during the Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous epochs (163.5 million to 100.5 million years ago). Its fossil was first discovered in western North America in 1874 and first described in 1879 by American paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. In 1903, however, the genus Brontosaurus, which means “thunder lizard” in Greek, was subsumed by the earlier-described genus Apatosaurus. Despite the change in classification, the public still embraced the dinosaur as Brontosaurus, owing to the widespread use of its likeness during much of the 20th century in advertising, motion pictures, and television, as well as the presence of Brontosaurus reconstructions in museums throughout North America and Europe. The genus Brontosaurus was reinstated in 2015 after a morphological study of the family to which those genera belonged revealed that the physical differences between Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were enough to separate them into two genera. The genus Brontosaurus contains only one species, B. excelsus (Rafferty "Brontosaurus").
brontosaurus, (genus Brontosaurus), genus of large herbivorous sauropod dinosaurs living during the Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous epochs (163.5 million to 100.5 million years ago). Its fossil was first discovered in western North America in 1874 and first described in 1879 by American paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. In 1903, however, the genus Brontosaurus, which means “thunder lizard” in Greek, was subsumed by the earlier-described genus Apatosaurus. Despite the change in classification, the public still embraced the dinosaur as Brontosaurus, owing to the widespread use of its likeness during much of the 20th century in advertising, motion pictures, and television, as well as the presence of Brontosaurus reconstructions in museums throughout North America and Europe. The genus Brontosaurus was reinstated in 2015 after a morphological study of the family to which those genera belonged revealed that the physical differences between Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were enough to separate them into two genera. The genus Brontosaurus contains only one species, B. excelsus (Rafferty "Brontosaurus").