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brontosaurus
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Illustration of a Brontosaurus dinosaur with a long neck and tail, walking on four legs, shown beside a faint outline of an elephant for size comparison. Scale bars indicate the Brontosaurus measures about 20 meters (66 feet) long.
A black-and-white hand-drawn dinosaur bends down to drink from a lake.
Vintage Gay Parita Sinclair gas station on Route 66 in Paris Junction, Missouri, with retro gas pumps, old signs, and a large Sinclair sign featuring a green dinosaur.
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Illustration of a Brontosaurus dinosaur with a long neck and tail, walking on four legs, shown beside a faint outline of an elephant for size comparison. Scale bars indicate the Brontosaurus measures about 20 meters (66 feet) long.
brontosaurus The dinosaur brontosaurus was comparable in size to a modern-day elephant. More than 100 years after the genus Brontosaurus fell out of favour with taxonomists in 1903, Swiss paleontologist Emanuel Tschopp and colleagues in April 2015 proposed restoring it as an official taxonomic unit.

brontosaurus

dinosaur genus
Also known as: Brontosaurus
Written by
John P. Rafferty
John P. Rafferty writes about Earth processes and the environment. He serves currently as the editor of Earth and life sciences, covering climatology, geology, zoology, and other topics that relate to...
John P. Rafferty
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Britannica Editors
Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....
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History

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...

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