![]() ![]() (The original material Marsh used to describe Brontosaurus was held at Yale, but Marsh never made an effort to publicly display the partial skeleton his crew found at Como Bluff, Wyoming. The AMNH mount was the first reconstruction of this dinosaur ever attempted, and in 1905, it was one of a kind. But all these little quirks of nomenclature and procedure had a major influence on the popularity of Brontosaurus over Apatosaurus. Exactly why Brontosaurus was allowed to live on-much to Riggs’ frustration-is unclear. Even though Riggs’ case would eventually win out, AMNH paleontologists Henry Fairfield Osborn and William Diller Matthew didn’t agree with the name change. The dinosaur was promoted as Brontosaurus, not Apatosaurus. The American Museum of Natural History mount went up in 1905. Both forms, Riggs concluded, belonged to the same genus, and Apatosaurus had priority since it was named first. In this particular case, the fact that the Apatosaurus ajax specimen came from a relatively young animal and the Brontosaurus excelsus specimen was an older animal led Marsh astray. Marsh at the height of the Bone Wars era, when many dinosaur specimens, no matter how subtle their differences, were given a new genus or species designation. Both had been named by Yale paleontologist O.C. (It wasn’t until the proper head of Apatosaurus was rediscovered-the specimen was excavated at Dinosaur National Monument in 1909 but confused for a Diplodocus skull for decades-that the move to publicly shun Brontosaurus started in earnest.) Indeed, in 1903 paleontologist Elmer Riggs recognized that Brontosaurus excelsus was extraordinarily similar to the skeleton of another sauropod, named Apatosaurus ajax. That issue was settled decades before I was even born, although museums and paleontologists themselves were slow to adopt the change. Today we know that the specimens once assigned to Brontosaurus excelsus really belonged within the genus Apatosaurus. I already liked dinosaurs, but after standing in the shadow of those column-like limbs and intricate vertebral column, I loved dinosaurs. I had seen illustrations of Brontosaurus before, but seeing the animal’s actual bones was a transcendent experience for me. When I first visited the skeleton in the late 1980s-before the museum’s dinosaur halls were renovated in the late 1990s-I was astonished. The skeleton mounted at the American Museum of Natural History is what really hooked me on the sauropod. The shuffling, swamp-dwelling dinosaur never really existed, yet, for my younger self, the Jurassic behemoth was an icon of everything dinosaurs were supposed to be. “ Brontosaurus” will always be special to me. ![]()
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