Is Brontosaurus Back?

what was it about the brontosaurus what was it about that name that conjured such a deep fire of curiosity in the hearts and minds of children and adults alike for brian sweet tech as he points out in his book might be love at brontosaurus it was because the shuffling swamp-dwelling hook was an icon of everything the dinosaurs were supposed to be big scaly and most of all so thoroughly bizarre that they could have only belonged to a primeval past but by now you've probably been told that brontosaurus the great Thunder lizard wasn't a real animal not that the bones once called brontosaurus didn't belong to a once living creature but that the dinosaurs correct name is the bland and unfamiliar Apatosaurus the brontosaurus story is part of a century-old web of tangled scientific rivalries and misinterpretation mistaken identity stubborn preconceptions and the public's staggering devotion to the name are all what gave the brontosaurus its legendary status to do this story justice we have to go back to the wild American west where the world's first great dinosaur hunters began their tireless quest to find the biggest most menacing and impressive beast of ages past two men both Neal Marsh from Yale University and Edward cope based out of New Jersey spent the better part of their careers in one of the longest lasting and most fearsome scientific rivalries in history after some disagreements surrounding the ownership of fossil bones from a quarry in New Jersey the two set out to do everything they could to further their own careers while stepping out of their way to sabotage each other's in their frenzy to discover and name as many extinct animals as they could each of them revealed scores of undiscovered species including Rhino like creatures with tusks horses with toes and menacing seagoing reptiles but nothing could prepare either of them for what would come next in 1877 while searching for fossils in the hills of Colorado a commercial collector hit pay dirt a treasure trove of huge fossil bones by this time just about all that was known of the extinct animals known as the dinosaur Ian's were a few fragmentary skeletons from Western Europe and the east coast of the United States the rocks these new colossal bones were eroding from belonged to a time in Earth's history known as the Jurassic period though nobody was quite sure just how old this age was it was certain that the history of life still held many surprises both Neil Marsh hired teams to unearth even more bones and soon after cope caught wind of Marcia's discoveries and soon opened digs of his own in the surrounding area the results were extraordinary within months the two were already discovering and naming new dinosaurs dozens of skeletons belonging to several new species were unearthed broadening the once narrow view of the lost world of the dinosaurs for the first time the scientific world was truly awed by the staggering strangeness of the dinosaurs a new yet extinct world had been eroding out of the American frontier unnoticed for millions of years one of the first dinosaurs Marsh named was one of astonishing size because he only had a partial skeleton of an immature individual it's full size was unknown but what he did have was nothing short of impressive it was among one of the first species of sauropod dinosaur ever discovered the group of long-necked plant eaters he went on to name the animal Apatosaurus Ajax soon afterwards Marsh heard news of similarly large Jurassic bones from a place in Wyoming called Como Bluff so he dispatched men to work there as well like clockwork cope followed suit sending in crews of his own then just as before there was no shortage of enormous skeletons among Martians Fiennes was another skeleton of a once great Jurassic Titan in 1879 he gave the name brontosaurus excelsis the great Thunder lizard this new skeleton stretched a remarkable 72 feet head to tail now the true size of these animals could be fully appreciated this specimen was remarkably well preserved with nearly every important bone and the animals great body accounted for - the skull headless sauropod seemed to be an all too common misfortune for paleontologists the skull bones of long-necked sauropod star remarkably thin and they break apart easily not to mention the minut size of the head in comparison to the dinosaurs massive bulk making head hunting even trickier marsh and other experts of his time didn't mount their prized skeletons for the public to see they only brought them to life on paper and in 1891 Marsh commissioned a reconstruction of brontosaurus to be drawn which revealed the true magnificence of the colossal reptile shortly after the deaths of marsh and Edward cope a fossil hunter from the Field Museum in Chicago named Elmer Riggs made a new discovery after extensively studying the remains of both Apatosaurus Ajax and brought to Saurus excelsis when described scientifically a new species is assigned to names a first and a last the first name is called a genus in the case of brontosaurus excelsis the genus name is brontosaurus and the last name excelsis is the specific species more often than not a genus contains several different species for instance the human genus is homo but there are several species within it like Homo sapiens Homo habilis Homo neanderthalensis Homo floresiensis and so on in 1903 Elmer rigs decided that there were enough differences between marshes to long necked dinosaurs to be called separate species but that they were still similar enough to belong to the same genus and since Apatosaurus was named two years earlier brontosaurus was reclassified as just another species of Apatosaurus the name brontosaurus was officially discarded and its status as a valid genus name was revoked and that should have been the end of it in 1905 the American Museum of Natural History assembled an Apatosaurus skeleton for display which also happened to be the world's first sauropod specimen ever mounted but it wasn't labeled Apatosaurus as it should have been for an unknown reason well aware of Rix's discovery just two years earlier the museum's director Henry Fairfield Osborn purposely labelled the skeleton brontosaurus it was this decision that led brontosaurus live on for decades a skull for this animal still had yet to be found but in the years to come one after the other museums across America began to mount their own specimens each with a unique take on the head like the so called brontosaurus in New York the Apatosaurus at Yale had a complete sculpted skull but to a much different effect the skull of a Camarasaurus another All American Jurassic dinosaur was placed on the neck of the Carnegie Museum's Apatosaurus due to budget cuts the Field Museum in Chicago couldn't afford expeditions to collect more complete skeletons so they left their Apatosaurus with the front half missing altogether mixed and matched incomplete and headless skeletons of brontosaurus graced the halls of American museums for decades where the dinosaur became a cultural Idol and betting itself into the hearts and minds of the world perhaps because it was an enormous beast yet so elegant to design a dull-witted creature yet so gentle a spirit an ancient and mysterious monster yet so new and familiar and animal it wasn't until the 1970s before somebody finally took notice of the head problem jack mccann Tosh a physicist turned paleontologist grew increasingly skeptical with the Camarasaurus skull hanging on the end of the carnegie museum's Apatosaurus he began to realize that Apatosaurus is much more similar to Diplodocus a more slender and lightly built Jurassic sauropod than either of them are to the Camarasaurus he thought that he may find a clue in the field notes of Elmen Riggs from his expeditions to the Jurassic rocks of Utah in 1909 Elmer Riggs writes of his spectacular discoveries at what would one day become Dinosaur National Monument he also tells of the discovery of several sauropod skulls most of which seem to belong to Diplodocus one of the skulls seemed a bit more wide and flat than the others so Riggs speculated that this skull may be the infamous head of Apatosaurus however his colleagues didn't take him seriously because they all felt sure that the blunt snouted sculptures and snub nosed Camarasaurus skulls are what a brontosaur head should look like jack mccann tosh took to rediscovering rigs his lost sauropod skull in the collections of the carnegie museum where in 1978 he found it all this time while Apatosaurus skeletons were suffering their own unique identity crisis the real skull had been here all along soon after jack mccann Tosh finally reunited Apatosaurus with the correct other museums followed suit by replacing their heads with replicas of the carnegie specimen the story of brontosaurus was one of the greatest in all of paleontology where bone hunters set out to discover the unknown and came back with the remains of some of the most strange and beautiful animals that ever graced our planet ones that we will never have the opportunity to see and that was the end of it brontosaurus was just an artifact of scientific history just as the dinosaurs are - the Earth's history or so we thought when in April 2015 three paleontologists released the study where they analyzed the evolutionary relationships of the diploid osun's the group of long necks Jurassic dinosaurs that includes Diplodocus barosaurus and Apatosaurus but when studying the remains of all known apatosaur species they noticed that a few of them stood out from the rest to form their own group which just so happens to include the genus ones called brontosaurus it seems that due to unique differences in size the anatomy of the neck pelvis and other physical features are enough to designate brontosaurus as a valid genus name once again for the first time in more than 110 years brontosaurus now stands apart from Apatosaurus since the days of Martian cope we have learned a staggering amount about life in the Jurassic brontosaurus lived in the Golden Age of sauropods where perhaps dozens of long-necked plant eaters species shared the floodplains of Western North America their world was one filled with a beautiful assemblage of unique animals some well-protected some not some enormous some minuscule where they often lived short brutal lives in a land of prowl by flesh eaters some adorned with spectacular spikes and horns some sleek and smooth some fast some slow some killers some opportunists together they lived and died on America's primeval stage for millions of years while the story of brontosaurus the great Thunder lizard serves as a monument to the endlessly changing nature of science it and its fellow Jurassic reptiles also stand in museums everywhere as ambassadors to an ancient time a unique window to their vanished world

Channel: The Living Past

Views: 27,587

Rating: 4.9045997 out of 5

Keywords: dinosaur, dinosaurs, Apatosaurus (Organism Classification), brontosaurus, evolution, history, science, scientists, debate, discovery, education, educational, scientific, paleontology, palaeontology, paleontologist, palaeontologist, paleontologists, palaeontologists, dinosauria, past, the living past, creation, earth, geology, Ethan Cowgill, Thought, Deduction, biology, zoology, feud, Story, Darwin, Documentary, Museum, Family, Culture, Age, prehistoric, Jurassic, ancient, wyoming, colorado, sauropod, creature, extinction

Id: QiliCc-wvj8

Length: 11min 23sec (683 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 02 2015