Did the Brontosaurus Exist?

The Brontosaurus technically hasn't existed in the living/breathing sense of the word for 150 million years. But did it ever exist? Was this iconic dinosaur the result of misclassification?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
it's Christian Seger. So our question for the day is
did the Brontosaurus exist? And the short answer, yeah, sure did.
But like so many answers, this one spawns a lot
more questions. Is that really its correct name? How is

(00:23):
it related to the apatosaurus? Wasn't it given the wrong skull?
And if it did exist, was it delicious? Let's back up,
We're gonna go to eighteen seventy seven. The confusion over
the Brontosaurus stems partially from confusion in biological taxonomy, but
also from a bitter rivalry of paleontologists. That's right, a

(00:46):
rivalry between friends turned enemies whose battle for fame and
power destroyed them. Both meet oath Neil Charles Marsh and
Edward Drinker Cope everything about giving your kid a middle
name like drink. They became good enough friends while studying
natural history together that in the eighteen sixties they even

(01:07):
named newly discovered fossils after each other. But Marsh was ambitious,
like Slytherin, ambitious. When Cope showed him around a fossil
quarry in camaraderie, Marsh struck a deal with the quarry
owner behind Cope's back. All the fossils found there and
the profits attached to them went straight to March, and

(01:27):
it sparked what history calls the bone Wars. This was
a fiery race to find and published papers about new
ancient creatures. One of these creatures was the Apatosaurus A Jacks,
a huge plant eater with a long neck and tail
that Marsh discovered in eighteen seventy seven. The skeleton was incomplete,

(01:49):
but Marsh wanted the credit for finding it, so he
slapped on the head of another dinosaur found nearby, a Chimarasaurus,
in his published reconstruction. Then in eighty five, Marsha's fossil
collectors sent him a set of bones belonging to a larger,
long necked, long tailed herbivore, a more complete set. Marsh

(02:14):
decided it was a different animal and published his discovery
of the Brontosaurus excels Us. His illustration of its skeleton
was the first dinosaur sketch to receive wide lay circulation,
and it caught the public's imagination. His haste was understandable.
Cope was battling Marsha's superior connections by practicing what's been

(02:35):
called taxonomic carpet bombing. He would publish four hundred articles
in his fifty six years. The two former buddies slandered
and sabotaged each other into financial and reputational ruin. Our
friends over at stuff you missed in history class. Actually
did a whole podcast to part in it if you

(02:56):
want a deeper dive. But back to the Brontosaurus. Shortly
after Cope and Marsha's deaths, a paleontologist studying Marsha's work
noticed that the Apatosaurus and the Brontosaurus skeletons were really similar,
so similar that the scientific community deemed the Brontosaurus Excelsus
an adult specimen of the Apatosaurus genus. So in nineteen

(03:20):
o three, Brontosaurus lost its official status, but museums, it seems,
didn't get the memo. Starting in nineteen o five, the
sauropods started seeing display around the world labeled Brontosaurus excelsus,
sometimes with a Camarasaurus head. It wasn't until the nineteen
nineties that these pervasive mistakes were corrected at large. But

(03:44):
the story doesn't end there. In April of fifteen, a
group led by paleontologist Emmanuel Chop published a study analyzing
eighty one sauropod specimens, including precise measurements of four hundred
and seventy seven different physical features. According to their findings,
they reported not only that Marsha's Brontosaurus excelsis skeleton had

(04:07):
enough differences to be considered its own species, but that
there should be two additional specimens in the Brontosaurus genus.
For now, the Brontosaurus isn't back for sure. It's up
to the scientific community to come to a consensus on
whether Brontosaurus and a Patosaurus deserve their own separate genera.

(04:27):
But the thunder lizard certainly wasn't a fake. Marsh was
just kind of a jerk. Check out the brainstuff channel
on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands of
other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.