An illustration of its skeleton “was the first dinosaur restoration to get a wide circulation,” points out North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences historian Paul Brinkman. Just two years earlier, Marsh had named Apatosaurus ajax-the “deceptive lizard”-from a partial skeleton found in the Jurassic rock of Colorado.īrontosaurus quickly gained fame because it was among the first dinosaurs the public encountered.
This “monster” of a dinosaur added to Marsh’s rapidly growing fossil collection, which already included similar species. The name Brontosaurus excelsus was coined by Yale paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh, who described the species in an 1879 paper with the mundane title “ Notice of New Jurassic Reptiles.” His description is based on an enormous partial skeleton exhumed from the 150-million-year-old rock of Como Bluff, Wyoming. “Roger’s calculations gave the same results,” Tschopp says. At first, Tschopp had been working only with Octávio Mateus of the Museu da Lourinhã to update the family tree of diplodocid dinosaurs.īut when it started looking like Brontosaurus might be real after all, they asked Roger Benson at the University of Oxford to join their team and run a statistical analysis on their findings. “We didn’t expect this at all at the beginning,” says study co-author Emmanuel Tschopp of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. A new analysis of dinosaur skeletons across multiple related species suggests that the original thunder lizard is actually unique enough to resurrect the beloved moniker, according to researchers in the U.K. The name for the long-necked, heavy-bodied herbivore Brontosaurus excelsus-the great “thunder lizard”-was tossed into the scientific wastebasket when it was discovered that the dinosaur wasn't different enough from other specimens to deserve its own distinct genus.īut now, in a paleontological twist, Brontosaurus just might be back. The trouble is that shortly after being discovered, the Jurassic creature fell into an identity crisis.
It may be one of the most famous dinosaurs of all time.
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