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1994-03-22
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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.