The Brontosaurus never existed

[Sensitive Blake Griffin]

damn it all to hell i think i've called them Brontosaurus in front of the kids. NOw i gotta watch Jurassic park II for the patch update or what?

Also if you didn't know(thank you Jurassic park again), a lot of Dinosaurs were completely feathered. Most notably being the velociraptor

 

[sm0ke]

little foot was not a brontosauraus

Duh, he was a long neck

 

[The Guru]

That's not right..Brontos where one of my favorites. Next thing you're going to tell me triceratops never bus his guns.

 

[88m3]

Forget Extinct: The Brontosaurus Never Even Existed
by NPR STAFF

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EnlargeJoshua Franzos/Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Apatosaurus (right, opposite a Diplodocus skeleton at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh), is what paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh actually found when he thought he'd discovered the Brontosaurus.
text size A A A December 9, 2012
It may have something to do with all those Brontosaurus burgers everyone's favorite modern stone-age family ate, but when you think of a giant dinosaur with a tiny head and long, swooping tail, the Brontosaurus is probably what you're seeing in your mind.

Well hold on: Scientifically speaking, there's no such thing as a Brontosaurus.

Even if you knew that, you may not know how the fictional dinosaur came to star in the prehistoric landscape of popular imagination for so long.

It dates back 130 years, to a period of early U.S. paleontology known as the Bone Wars, says Matt Lamanna, curator at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.


Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Othniel Charles Marsh was a professor of paleontology at Yale who made many dinosaur fossil discoveries, including the Apatosaurus — and the fictional Brontosaurus.
The Bone Wars was the name given to a bitter competition between two paleontologists, Yale's O.C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope of Philadelphia. Lamanna says their mutual dislike, paired with their scientific ambition, led them to race dinosaur names into publication, each trying to outdo the other.

"There are stories of either Cope or Marsh telling their fossil collectors to smash skeletons that were still in the ground, just so the other guy couldn't get them," Lamanna tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered. "It was definitely a bitter, bitter rivalry."

The two burned through money, and were as much fame-hungry trailblazers as scientists.

It was in the heat of this competition, in 1877, that Marsh discovered the partial skeleton of a long-necked, long-tailed, leaf-eating dinosaur he dubbed Apatosaurus. It was missing a skull, so in 1883 when Marsh published a reconstruction of his Apatosaurus, Lamanna says he used the head of another dinosaur — thought to be a Camarasaurus — to complete the skeleton.

"Two years later," Lamanna says, "his fossil collectors that were working out West sent him a second skeleton that he thought belonged to a different dinosaur that he named Brontosaurus."

But it wasn't a different dinosaur. It was simply a more complete Apatosaurus — one that Marsh, in his rush to one-up Cope, carelessly and quickly mistook for something new.


EnlargeCarnegie Museum of Natural History
This photograph from 1934 shows the Carnegie Museum's Apatosaurus skeleton on the right — wearing the wrong skull.
Although the mistake was spotted by scientists by 1903, the Brontosaurus lived on, in movies, books and children's imaginations. The Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh even topped its Apatosaurus skeleton with the wrong head in 1932. The apathy of the scientific community and a dearth of well-preserved Apatosaurus skulls kept it there for nearly 50 years.

That Brontosaurus finally met its end in the 1970s when two Carnegie researchers took a second look at the controversy. They determined a skull found in a quarry in Utah in 1910 was the true Apatosaurus skull. In 1979 the correct head was placed atop the museum's skeleton.

The Brontosaurus was gone at last, but Lamanna suggests the name stuck in part because it was given at a time when the Bone Wars fueled intense public interest in the discovery of new dinosaurs. And, he says, it's just a better name.

"Brontosaurus means 'thunder lizard,'" he says. "It's a big, evocative name, whereas Apatosaurus means 'deceptive lizard.' It's quite a bit more boring."

Forget Extinct: The Brontosaurus Never Even Existed : NPR

 

[Fillerguy]

:obamatu:

 

[The_King_of_Everything]

What if dinosaurs were reptilians

 

[Dafunkdoc_Unlimited]

​

 

[sm0ke]

That's not right..Brontos where one of my favorites. Next thing you're going to tell me triceratops never bus his guns.

They... They do exist. Just as a different name. Same dinosaur, different name.

So you can still imagine yourself riding one through a rainforest, climbing up its neck to the top of its head, to pick an exotic fruit off of a tree when you get hungry.

 

[Berniewood Hogan]

What if dinosaurs were reptilians

 

[Heretic]

I remember reading that a long time ago about dude switching skulls on a dino skeleton on accident or on purpose, kinda funny seeing it again now years later. There's a bunch of dinos that could have been mistaken for each other I guess and a lot of those long neck dinos look alike too in principle.

 

[Blackking]

Also if you didn't know(thank you Jurassic park again), a lot of Dinosaurs were completely feathered. Most notably being the velociraptor

Jurassic park didn't even try when it came to the Velociraptor. All the characteristics in the movie were off and it didn't have any feathers. ..

BUT..
Study challenges bird-from-dinosaur theory of evolution

 

[Real]

Hold up.. dinosaurs are fake? i aint believing shyt nomore

You stupid fukks, the Apatosaurus is a real dinosaur. He misclassified the brontosaurus as a brontosaurus when it was really an Apatosaurus. (he thought he discovered a new species)

Exactly. I swear nikkas on this board have horrible reading comprehension. Smh.