Mounted skeleton of Brontosaurus excelsus at the American Museum of Natural HistoryWIKIMEDIA, FUNKMONKIt may be time to re-rewrite the history books that had omitted Brontosaurus from the pantheon of gigantic dinosaurs, instead lumping the species Brontosaurus excelsus in with another mammoth dinosaur, Apatosaurus ajax. Researchers from Portugal and the U.K. have suggested reinstating genus Brontosaurus after analyzing hundreds of characteristics in dozens of fossil bones collected around the world. They published their results yesterday (April 7) in PeerJ.
“The differences we found between Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were at least as numerous as the ones between other closely related genera, and much more than what you normally find between species,” coauthor Roger Benson of the University of Oxford said in a statement.
To fans and students of paleontology, the story of Brontosaurus’s demise is well known. Rivals Edward Cope and Othniel Marsh unearthed the fossilized bones of gigantic dinosaurs in the American West in the mid- and late- 19th century. Marsh excavated the massive skeleton of what he dubbed Apatosaurus ajax in Colorado in 1877. Cope found the bones of another colossal dino in the same rock formation in 1879. He called his find Brontosaurus excelsus. Over the ensuing decades, paleontologists found another fossil ...
