Forget Extinct: The Brontosaurus Never Even Existed

http://www.npr.org/2012/12/09/166665795/forget-extinct-the-brontosaurus-never-even-existed?ft=1&f=1007

by Pr0 • 14 years ago

51 35 14 years ago

robbrown4512• 14 years ago

Sure it existed. It just had two names.

akavi• 14 years ago

I was pretty dino crazy (as most kids are, I suppose), and to me, Brontosaurus denotes the animal with the short, massive head that the camarasaurus skull implies, rather than the slender head that the actual Apatosaurus had.

That chimera certainly never existed.

nash2• 14 years ago

One of the points of the article is the head/skull usually associated with the Brontosaurus was incorrect, as well as the body being a duplicate.

So with the usual headline sensationalism, it is fair to say "it never existed". More accurately, one could say something like "the dinosaur popularly known as brontosaurus, is actually a aptosaurus with a different head..." But as a headline, it lacks punch.

artsrc• 14 years ago

I enjoyed Stephen Jay Gould's books:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bully_for_Brontosaurus

chernevik• 14 years ago

Let's rename the thing a Plutosaurus. After the brontosauroid kicked out of the planets.

nash2• 14 years ago

I prefer the Peppa Pig version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfMYw33jph0

Lerc• 14 years ago

Brian Blessed, awesome.

someperson• 14 years ago

Here's an interesting article about the production side Peppa Pig that people reading this might be interested in:

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/b7bcd9b6-9ab1-11df-87e6-00144...

sabat• 14 years ago

This isn't actually news. I think I knew about Apatosaurus (vs. Brontosaurus) in the 1970s.

shardling• 14 years ago

Heh, I remember learning about it and thinking, oh, I wonder when they figured this out.

I was pretty ticked off when I learned it was the 70's, and yet I still was taught about the brontosaurus in school a decade later. Makes me wonder if kids today still get taught about the ninth planet Pluto.

Vivtek3• 14 years ago

I think Pluto got a whole lot more press in pop culture. Arguably a good thing - pop culture has really improved in science coverage since the 70s.

ahoy• 14 years ago

This isn't remotely new information. I knew the brontosaurus was never a real thing as a kid.

fingerprinter• 14 years ago

IMO, while this is old news, the outcome is something I think we can showcase as why science is awesome. A mistake was found, and even though there was some huge investment in the idea, it was corrected. It took time, sure, but it was still corrected.

Had this been a religious idea, I'm afraid the new evidence would have been buried and we'd still have the old, wrong idea.

robbrown4512• 14 years ago

Except that the main "mistake" had to do with naming conventions, as opposed to actual science.

We've refined our view of other dinos over the years, but we don't say that T-Rex never existed just because we know he stood differently than we first imagined.

onan_barbarian• 14 years ago

It wasn't really just naming conventions. Having a second name for something that already existed - not to mention having the 'brontosaurus' being made from some bogus parts, eg. a skull of another dinosaur - is more than a simple naming error.

pkulak2• 14 years ago

Religion has no use for evidence in creating or revising any idea. But I still get your point.

politician2• 14 years ago

Let's try to be more tolerant then /r/atheism.

pathy2• 14 years ago

To be fair, at least the Catholic church seems to accept evolution and such things and priests used to be the top scientists back in medieval times.

pretoriusB2• 14 years ago

>Had this been a religious idea, I'm afraid the new evidence would have been buried and we'd still have the old, wrong idea.

Historically, religions have been found to be very adapting, incorporating new and existing ideas, and even elements from other religions. Christianity, for one, has incorporated many foreign elements and have changed over the years adapting to every era.

Sure, people have also been burned as a consequence of religion. Then again, people have been killed as a consequence of science too. 240.000 men, women, children and elderly died in Hiroshima and Nagashaki from the direct results of several years of work by the top physicists of the time. Or the people had followed psychiatric treatments such as lobotomy we now consider BS. Or the tens of thousands sterilised (in Western Europe) by eugenics programs that run until the '70s. Those are consequences of science too -- one cannot separate it from politics arbitrarily, else we can say the same about religion "oh, but a TRUE believer would never harm anyone", etc. Well, many very true scientists are working on biological weapons and other scary things, and a lot of true scientists amongst them hate other people or nations with a passion.

illuminate3• 14 years ago

"Historically, religions have been found to be very adapting"

You're talking about syncretism. As new religions are generated, they draw from previous ritual and myth. This is not the sort of adaptation to eliminate falsehoods referenced here. The bible includes elements cribbed from other religions, it is not rewritten to be factual.

WalterBright• 14 years ago

What I enjoy about dinosaurs is how simultaneously we know so much about them, and yet so very little.

mediocregopher• 14 years ago

Relevant: http://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_shape_shifting_dinosaur...

nshepperd• 14 years ago

The article appears to be somewhat mistaken, judging by http://ehis.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?sid=5fc8615c-3e1a-48a..., http://www.unmuseum.org/dinobront.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatosaurus#History (the latter two which are barely more reputable). The artificial head wasn't put on the body of the Apatosaurus (the first skeleton), which apparently was never put on display as a full skeleton at all. It was the second skeleton, which he named Brontosaurus and mounted in the Yale Peabody Museum with the wrong head.

This story is also more consistent with saying the Brontosaurus "never existed", since it was the Brontosaurus that got given the wrong head. (Though one could well argue that Brontosaurus was just another name for Apatosaurus with the whole head thing just being an error in the visual representation of the dinosaur referred to by Brontosaurus.)

iamtherockstar• 14 years ago

Related: There's apparently a similar thing happening with the triceratops/toroceratops. It's likely that the former is just an young version of the latter, not a different species.

http://www.newser.com/story/97112/triceratops-never-existed....

Vivtek3• 14 years ago

My entire childhood is being retconned out of existence. First brontosaurs, then Pluto, now Triceratops - what's next, Count Chocula will turn out to have been a miscategorized lemur?

panabee• 14 years ago

"It was missing a skull, so in 1883 when Marsh published a reconstruction of his Apatosaurus, Lamanna says he used the head of another dinosaur — thought to be a Camarasaurus — to complete the skeleton."

Since the first Apatosaurus featured the skull of another dinosaur, meaning Marsh named a non-existent animal, couldn't you argue that the Brontosaurus was the right name since it was applied to a more accurate reconstruction?

Forget Extinct: The Brontosaurus Never Even Existed

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