Brontosaurus - one of the most recognized dinosaur names of all time. But what ever happened to this dinosaur? The story is best told by first examining the discovery of Apatosaurus. The first fossils of Apatosaurus were discovered by Arthur Lakes in the spring of 1877 near Morrison, Colorado. Lakes sent this material and some more from another quarry to Othniel C. Marsh at Yale University, who paid $100.00 for it. That very same year Marsh published a description and named the dinosaur Apatosaurus ajax. No skull had been found, so Apatosaurus made its debut headless. Two years later, in 1879, a brace of sauropod skeletons was discovered at Como Bluff, Wyoming, which also was being quarried by Marsh's collectors, this time W. H. Reed and E. G. Ashley. One specimen was an almost complete skeleton - both lacked a skull. Even though the bones were not shipped to Yale until the fall and winter of 1879-1880, Marsh published one as Brontosaurus excelsus in 1879, and the other as Brontosaurus amplus in 1881. Marsh now attempted the first reconstruction ever of a sauropod skeleton from the Wyoming bones, which he completed in 1883. For a skull, he used fragments found in quarries some distance from Como Bluff. Unfortunately, it turns out they came from another long-necked sauropod, Camarasaurus. Eventually, some scientists became suspicious of Marsh's Brontosaurus. In 1909, an expedition of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History found two headless skeletons of Brontosaurus in Utah with a skull lying a few feet away. It was much more like Diplodocus than Camarasaurus. By the time the bones arrived in Pittsburgh, a smaller skull was unpacked first, making an improbable match with the bodies, and somehow the other skull was overlooked. Then, in 1975, John McIntosh and David Berman discovered the "lost skull" in the collections, and by the end of 1981 the heads had been switched on exhibit specimens at Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and at Carnegie, itself. McIntosh and Berman made their discovery by plowing through tons of bones, and reams of original site descriptions. In the process they came to the realization that the bones from Como Bluff Marsh had called Brontosaurus were just like the bones from Colorado he had named Apatosaurus, two years earlier. The first name has priority, and in 1978 Berman and McIntosh also set that record straight by including all the material formerly known as Brontosaurus within one genus, Apatosaurus. So popular is the name, Brontosaurus, that it refuses to die a quiet death. The very concept of "The Thunder Reptile" that was so huge it shook the earth with its footsteps says DINOSAUR to almost everyone. "Brontosaurus" still appears in print, and in quotes it is a perfectly good descriptive term for these huge sauropods.