Back in 1903 paleontologists declared that the dinosaur Brontosaurus was not actually a brontosaurus, instead the assembled fossils on display in several museums around the world were specimens of a different dinosaur.
Now, with rather more fossil remains found and many variants of the plant-eating sauropod dinosaurs to examine, biologists have declared that Brontosaurus is in fact sufficiently different to warrant its own name again.
The name Brontosaurus dates back to the so-termed “Bone Wars” of the late 1800s, when rival fossil hunters Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope raced new dinosaur names into the scientific literature. The American west in particular was fertile ground for fossil hunters.
During this period, the Verge reports, Marsh came across fossilized remains from two long-necked sauropods. One of these was described as Apatosaurus ajax (for “deceptive lizard”) and the other was named Brontosaurus excelsus (the name Brontosaurus means “noble thunder lizard”).
What happened next was that scientists from the Field Museum of Chicago found another dinosaur skeleton which looked a little like both Apatosaurus ajax and Brontosaurus excelsus. This resulted in scientists declaring that Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus were simply different species within the same family. Here, Apatosaurus won out because it was the first of the two to be named. This led to Brontosaurus excelsus becoming officially named Apatosaurus excelsus.
Despite this renaming, the name Brontosaurus stuck and the dinosaur was still commonly referred to by its original title, contrary to scientific literature and most museum plaques.
The restoration of the name has been proposed by Emanuel Tschopp from the New University of Lisbon in Portugal. This is based on a large scale, computer driven review of the world’s collected species and genera of diplodocid dinosaurs. Tschopp’s analysis has found that Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus are indeed very different, and that the Brontosaurus name should be put back into use.
Writing on his blog, Tschopp said: “we found that differences between the genera Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus are numerous enough to revive Brontosaurus as its own genus, a name which has long been considered invalid in the scientific community.”
The declaration that the dinosaur beloved of many school books and museums is back in fashion has been published in the journal PeerJ. The research paper is titled “A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda).”
