brontosaurus

brontosaurus, (genus Brontosaurus), genus of large herbivorous sauropod dinosaurs living during the Late Jurassic and Early Cretaceous epochs (163.5 million to 100.5 million years ago). Its fossil was first discovered in western North America in 1874 and first described in 1879 by American paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. In 1903, however, the genus Brontosaurus, which means “thunder lizard” in Greek, was subsumed by the earlier-described genus Apatosaurus. Despite the change in classification, the public still embraced the dinosaur as Brontosaurus, owing to the widespread use of its likeness during much of the 20th century in advertising, motion pictures, and television, as well as the presence of Brontosaurus reconstructions in museums throughout North America and Europe. The genus Brontosaurus was reinstated in 2015 after a morphological study of the family to which those genera belonged revealed that the physical differences between Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were enough to separate them into two genera. The genus Brontosaurus contains only one species, B. excelsus.

Taxonomic controversy

Marsh excavated Brontosaurus’s nearly complete, but headless, skeleton from rocks dating to the Jurassic Period at Como Bluff Quarry 10, Wyoming. Shortly after he described it in the American Journal of Science, Brontosaurus became the iconic sauropod within scientific circles. Marsh created a poster-sized paper reconstruction of the specimen in 1883. By that time Brontosaurus had gained fame as being the most-complete sauropod fossil ever discovered, and illustrations of the dinosaur also appeared in newspapers and other periodicals as the late 19th century drew to a close. Museums made plans to place Brontosaurus reconstructions in their institutions, and in 1905 the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City became the first to do so—the first dinosaur reconstruction of a sauropod dinosaur.

Controversy erupted in 1903, however, after a reevaluation of Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus specimens by American paleontologist Elmer Riggs. He concluded that Marsh’s Apatosaurus specimen was simply a younger version of the same type of sauropod represented by his Brontosaurus specimen and that the two genera should thus be consolidated into one. Apatosaurus was first described in 1877, two years before Brontosaurus, and, according to taxonomic naming rules, it therefore became the official genus under which both dinosaurs were classified. Consequently, the species B. excelsus was changed to A. excelsus, joining A. ajax in genus Apatosaurus, and the name Brontosaurus was reduced to a mere synonym.

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Confusion stemming from Marsh’s mistaken association of Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus with a sauropod later identified as Camarasaurus prevented accurate reconstruction and measurement. Because no Brontosaurus skeleton had been found with its skull, his reconstructions of that animal featured a purely conjectural skull based partly on that of Camarasaurus. That error coloured the perceptions of paleontologists, museum curators, and the public for decades. Not until 1978 did scientists find that Apatosaurus (and, therefore, dinosaurs once identified as Brontosaurus) had had a head much more like that of the sauropod Diplodocus. After 1978 more-accurate measurements were taken, and the maximum head-to-tail length for Apatosaurus was estimated at 21–22.8 metres (68.9–74.8 feet). A 2015 study by Swiss paleontologist Emanuel Tschopp and colleagues estimated that an average-sized Brontosaurus weighed 30.5 tonnes (33.6 tons). In contrast, the average Apatosaurus was heavier, weighing an estimated 41.3 tonnes (45.4 tons), and longer, measuring up to 27.4 metres (90 feet) from head to tail.

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Despite the change in formal classification (and the decades of confusion about its size), the appeal of pairing the moniker Brontosaurus with the sauropod form did not fade easily. Museums were slow to adopt the change in classification, and several still labeled their specimens Brontosaurus until the 1980s. The slow acceptance of the change may have resulted from Riggs’s decision to publish his conclusions in the little-known journal Geological Series, which was issued by the Field Columbian Museum (now the Field Museum) in Chicago. AMNH paleontologists Henry Fairfield Osborn and William Diller Matthew disagreed with Riggs’s conclusion and continued to refer to the dinosaur as Brontosaurus in the museum’s collections and in later publications.

Indeed, images of Brontosaurus continued to capture the imagination of the public throughout the 20th century. The Sinclair Oil Corporation used it in its brand logo starting in 1930, and the “Sinclair dinosaur” became one of the most-recognizable symbols in American business. American film producer Walt Disney highlighted it, along with other dinosaurs, in Fantasia (1940), and a young animated Brontosaurus-like sauropod was the lead character in the film The Land Before Time (1988).

Reinstating genus Brontosaurus

Interest in restoring Brontosaurus as a valid genus has remained since Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus were merged into one. Years before the publication of the paper by Tschopp and colleagues, some paleontologists argued that the differences between A. ajax and A. excelsus were great enough to force a reclassification of the latter species. Beginning in the 1990s, noted American paleontologist Robert Bakker argued that position, along with a subsequent name change. However, it was not until the 2015 paper by Tschopp and colleagues that the reinstatement of Brontosaurus became a viable possibility. The paper focused on family Diplodocidae (which contains Apatosaurus), and their endeavour was the largest phylogenetic analysis of sauropods performed up to that time. Tschopp and colleagues examined 477 individual physical features (morphological characters) spanning 81 different individual sauropods recovered from sites across the globe. They concluded that the differences between Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus were numerous enough to reinstate the latter as a valid genus.

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Natural history

Brontosaurus closely resembled Apatosaurus both in anatomy and habit. Like Apatosaurus, Brontosaurus was quadrupedal, possessing four stout legs, as well as a long neck that was balanced by a long tail. The first museum specimens measured 20.3 metres (about 66.5 feet), with initial weight estimates somewhere between 28.1 and 34.5 tonnes (31 and 38 tons). Brontosaurus was herbivorous and lived on land. Its long neck may have evolved to reach marshy vegetation some distance away or to reach leaves higher up in trees. Brontosaurus also consumed stones to help grind up and digest unchewed plant matter once it reached the stomach.