(classical string music)
- So, our question for the day
is did the Brontosaurus exist?
Yes.
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(tape rewinding)
The full thing.
Yeah it sure did, but like so many answers,
this one spawns a lot more questions.
Let's back up.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, not that far, we're just going to 1877.
(bell dings)
Better.
The confusion over the Brontosaurus
stems partially from confusion in biological taxonomy.
But also, from a bitter rivalry of paleontologists.
Meet Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope.
They became good enough friends
while studying natural history together
that in the 1860s they even named
newly discovered fossils after each other.
But, Marsh was ambitious.
Like, Slytherin ambitious.
When Cope showed him around the fossil quarry
in camaraderie, Marsh struck a deal
with the quarry owner behind Cope's back.
All the fossils found there and the profits attached to them
went straight to Marsh.
And it sparked what history calls the Bone Wars,
a fiery race to find and publish papers
about new ancient creatures.
One of those creatures was the Apatosaurus ajax,
a huge plant eater with a long neck and tail
that Marsh discovered in 1877.
The skeleton was incomplete,
but Marsh wanted the credit for finding it,
so he slapped on the head of another dinosaur found nearby,
a Camarasaurus, in his published reconstruction.
Then in 1885, Marsh's fossil collectors
sent him a set of bones belonging to a larger
long-necked, long-tailed herbivore, a more complete set.
Marsh decided it was a different animal
and published his discovery of the Brontosaurus excelsus.
His illustration of its skeleton
was the first dinosaur sketch
to receive wide lay circulation
and it caught the public's imagination.
His haste was understandable.
Cope was battling Marsh's superior connections
by practicing what's been called taxonomic carpet-bombing.
He would publish 1,400 articles in his 56 years.
The two former buddies slandered and sabotaged each other
into financial and reputational ruin.
Our friends over at Stuff You Missed in History Class
did a whole podcast two-parter on it.
Back to the Brontosaurus.
Shortly after Cope and Marsh's deaths,
a paleontologist studying Marsh's work
noticed that the Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus skeletons
were really similar.
So similar that the scientific community
deemed the Brontosaurus exelsus an adult specimen
of the Apatosaurus genus.
So in 1903, Brontosaurus lost its official status.
(audience groaning)
But museums, it seems, didn't get the memo.
Starting in 1905, the sauropod started seeing display
around the world, labeled Brontosaurus excelsus,
sometimes with a Camarasaurus head.
It wasn't until the 1990s
that these pervasive mistakes were corrected at large.
But, the story doesn't end there.
In April of 2015,
a group led by paleontologist Emanuel Tschopp
published a study analyzing 81 sauropod specimens.
According to their findings, they reported not only
that Marsh's Brontosaurus excelsus skeleton
has enough differences to be considered its own species,
but that there should be two additional species
in the Brontosaurus genus.
For now, the Brontosaurus isn't back for sure.
It's up to the scientific community to come to a consensus
on whether Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus
deserve their own separate genera.
But the thunder lizard certainly wasn't a fake.
Marsh was just a jerk.
So, what do you think?
Will the Brontosaurus always live on in your heart?
Let me know in the comments.
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