No skeleton of a Brontosaurus, thunder lizard" and one of the classic dinosaurs, has ever been found with a complete skull.1 Yet I would wager that most of us, of a certain age at least, have in mind a clear picture of the ancient beast’s face. This confusing juxtaposition hints at the strange history of sauropod classification, and to explore that history we must travel back in time to . . .
The Bone Wars were a contest between dueling paleontologists, Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, to be the first to identify new dinosaurs.2 In 1877 Marsh named an incomplete skeleton of a long-neck quadruped Apatosaurus. It had no skull. Then, in 1879, another partial skeleton was found and for it Marsh coined Brontosaurus.
Early on, the skull issue was dealt with in problematic ways. The first skeleton put on display at the American Museum of Natural History featured a skull based on a different dinosaur, the Camarasaurus. A later mount at the Yale Peabody Museum sported its own skull-reconstruction design that would prove inaccurate. It would eventually be replaced. Though again there are no clear bronto-skull specimens to go by, the view now is that Brontosaurus had a skull more similar to yet another sauropod, Diplodocus.
Not long after this, however, paleontologists–notably Elmer Riggs in 19033–began to rethink the distinction, eventually coming to regard these two skeletons as belonging to the same genus, which would mean that scientifically Apatosaurus is the correct name, being the earlier given.
By the end of the 20th century, this debate seemed more or less sorted. NPR broadcast a story in 2012 titled “Forget Extinct: The Brontosaurus Never Even Existed”. To be clear, the issue isn’t really whether or not it was a real creature, but rather whether or not the name is a scientifically valid description of that creature.
Yet the idea of the Brontosaurus persisted, due in large part to its pop cultural prominence in early cinema and advertising. One might argue that with the possible exception of the T-Rex, Brontosaurus is the quintessential dino.
And then, about a decade ago, a funny thing happened: a rigorous effort to review sauropod fossils and classifications returned verdict that the Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus are indeed different enough to be considered separate creatures. Just three years after the aforementioned NPR story, the Scientific American ran an article titled “The Brontosaurus Is Back”.
That assertion was not universally accepted and whether it will stand in the future, I cannot say. Here is a nice article that covers the matter in readable fashion. But it is nice to think that the Thunder Lizard was indeed real all along.
Have a good Saturday 🦕
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For all you skeleton fans out there, the Bone Wars font above is the free Dino by JoannaVu.