Brontosaurus ???

University of Wyoming has a great display of dinosaur but bones. We went specifically to see a “complete” (60%) brontosaurus. It seems there really isn’t any such thing as a brontosaurus. The explanation is found in the “Bone Wars”. This was a very fierce competition between two paleontologists Marsh and Cope to find as many fossils as they could to outdo the other. In 1877 Marsh discovered a partial skeleton of a long necked dinosaur he dubbed Apatosaurus. It was missing a skull, so in 1883 when he published a reconstruction of his Apatosaurus, he used the head of another dinosaur (Thought to be a Camarasaurus) to complete the skeleton.

Two years later his collectors sent him another skeleton he thought  belonged to a different dinosaur that he named Brontosaurus. It turned out it was a more complete Aptosaurus, one that in his rush to one-up Cope, carelessly mistook for something new.

The mistake was spotted in 1903, but the name was entrenched in books and movies. The Carnegie Museum in Pittsburg even topped its Apatosaurus with the wrong head in 1932. In the 1970’s researchers determined the skull found in 1910 was a true Apatosaurus head and the correct head was placed on the museum’s skeleton.

The Brontosaurus was gone at last. The name means “thunder lizard”; whereas Apatosaurus means “deceptive lizard” which is a bit more boring.

The skull in the lower right hand corner is the one that was originally on the skeleton.