Dr Tschopp examined hundreds of dinosaurs in museums across the world and built a huge database that records how they differ in age, size and anatomical features. From this they built a family tree that showed Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus as closely related, but not identical.
They also applied various statistical analyses to the database and family tree to demonstrate that the skeletons of Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus were more different from each other than many other types of long-necked dinosaurs that have long been classified separately.
So does this mean the case is closed and Brontosaurus thunders back to its throne? Maybe, or maybe not. I am curious to see how my fellow palaeontologists react to the paper. To be honest, I am on the fence myself. There may be no firm resolution to this debate, which is frustrating. But this is because naming things is more art than science.
There is no machine or experiment that can tell you whether two things are different enough to be called different. Even modern biologists struggle mightily to define species of modern animals — and we can observe those and study their DNA. Nomenclature will always be open to debate, value judgements and passionate arguments.
Regardless of its name, it was a monstrous creature which thrived hundreds of millions of years ago and was larger than almost anything else that ever lived on land. This dinosaur by any other name, or any name indeed, would still be just as fascinating. Riggs concluded that both specimens were the same species and that since Apatosaurus was named first, Brontosaurus should be re-labeled Apatosaurus convention among Paleontologists is that the first name gets precedence.
That was years ago, but still Brontosaurus casts a long shadow over modern paleo related pop-culture. Why is this? The sauropod appeared in the first ever dinosaur cartoon Gertie The Dinosaur and the first ever stop motion dinosaur blockbuster The Lost World With its status as the most charismatic of all the dinosaurs confirmed by the success of these movies, Brontosaurus went on to star in hundreds of more films, eventually becoming a household name.
Did they fear public outcry? Did they not want to loose one of their most famous mascots? Perhaps they were not entirely sold on the reclassification and feared that the species would return as soon as they finished relabeling?
Probably all three of these factors contributed to the delay. By the end of the 20th century, however, whatever fears they had seem to have evaporated. I am not sure when exactly the Peabody relabeled their specimen, but the AMNH specimen was relabeled in , when its mount was updated with a more accurate posture. Author: ScottRobertAnselmo. Then, just 20 years after the debate had finally been settled, a study published in suggested that the Brontosaurus skeleton originally described by Marsh is indeed distinct enough from Apatosaurus to be classified as a separate species.
Not only that, but several other specimens that had previously been identified as Apatosaurs were found to belong to two distinct subspecies of Brontosaurus. So we went from zero species of Brontosaurus in to 3 in How did this happen? Well, telling different dinosaur species apart can be a difficult task considering that all you have is the skeleton, usually incomplete.
In North America many specimens of long necks belonging to the Diplodocidae family to which both the Apatosaurs and the supposed Brontosaurs belong have been discovered and because the bones are all big and all pretty similar paleontologists have always had hard time figuring out how to classify them into different species. Hundreds of skeletal features were compared against one another and a computer program was used to sort the specimens into separate species depending on the number of traits they had in common.
Apparently a large number of small differences, most notably a thinner neck, sets Brontosaurus skeletons apart from Apatosaurus. So there you are. Come check her our in our Morian Hall of Paleontology! Adventure is my middle name. I am in awe of the authors," he says. It was only with many recent findings of dinosaurs similar to Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus that it became possible to reexamine how different they actually were and breathe new life into Brontosaurus , he says.
Although while Kenneth Carpenter, director and curator of paleontology at Utah State University Eastern's Prehistoric Museum, finds this study impressive, he notes the fossil on which Apatosaurus is based has never been described in detail, and suggests the researchers should have done so if they wanted to compare it with Brontosaurus.
But I think the verdict is still out. Indeed, the recognition of Brontosaurus as separate from Apatosaurus is "only the tip of the iceberg," he adds. Yet another nice complete apatosaur, which is in a museum in Tokyo, is probably yet another new and distinct dinosaur.
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