Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and this is a classic
Speaker 1: episode from our erstwhile host, Christian Sager. It concerns the
Speaker 1: murky mysteries of prehistoric animals and the even murkier motivations
Speaker 1: of some of the people who have hunted their fossils. Hey,
Speaker 1: great stuff, it's Christian Sager. So our question for the
Speaker 1: day is did the Brontosaurus exist? And the short answer, yeah,
Speaker 1: it sure did. But like so many answers, this one
Speaker 1: spawns a lot more questions. Is that really its correct name?
Speaker 1: How is it related to the apatosaurus? Wasn't it given
Speaker 1: the wrong skull? And if it did exist, was it delicious?
Speaker 1: Let's back up, We're gonna go to eighteen seventy seven.
Speaker 1: The confusion over the Brontosaurus stems partially from confusion in
Speaker 1: biological taxonomy, but also from a bitter rivalry of paleontologists.
Speaker 1: That's right, a rivalry between friends turned enemies whose battle
Speaker 1: for fame and power destroyed them. Both meet both Neil
Speaker 1: Charles marsh and Edward Drinker cope everything about giving your
Speaker 1: kid a middle name like Drinker. They became good enough
Speaker 1: friends while studying natural history together that in the eighteen
Speaker 1: sixties they even named newly discovered fossils after each other.
Speaker 1: But Marsh was ambitious, like Slytherin ambitious. When Cope showed
Speaker 1: him around a fossil quarry in Camaraderie, Marsh struck a
Speaker 1: deal with the quarry owner behind Cope's back. All the
Speaker 1: fossils found there and the profits attached to them went
Speaker 1: straight to Marsh, and it sparked what history calls the
Speaker 1: bone Wars. This was a fiery race to find and
Speaker 1: published papers about new ancient creatures. One of these creatures
Speaker 1: was the Apatosaurus a jacks, a huge plant eater with
Speaker 1: a long neck and all that Marsh discovered in eighteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven. The skeleton was incomplete, but Marsh wanted the
Speaker 1: credit for finding it, so he slapped on the head
Speaker 1: of another dinosaur found nearby, a Chimarasaurus, in his published reconstruction.
Speaker 1: Then in eighteen eighty five, Marsha's fossil collectors sent him
Speaker 1: a set of bones belonging to a larger, long necked,
Speaker 1: long tailed herbivore, a more complete set. Marsh decided it
Speaker 1: was a different animal and published his discovery of the
Speaker 1: Brontosaurus excels Us. His illustration of its skeleton was the
Speaker 1: first dinosaur sketch to receive wide lay circulation, and it
Speaker 1: caught the public's imagination. His haste was understandable. Cope was
Speaker 1: battling Marsha's superior connections by practicing what's been called taxonomic
Speaker 1: carpet bombing. He would publish fourteen hundred articles in his
Speaker 1: fifty six years. The two former das slandered and sabotaged
Speaker 1: each other into financial and reputational ruin. Our friends over
Speaker 1: its stuff you missed in history class, actually did a
Speaker 1: whole podcast two part in it if you want a
Speaker 1: deeper dive. But back to the Brontosaurus. Shortly after Cope
Speaker 1: and Marsha's deaths, a paleontologist studying Marsha's work noticed that
Speaker 1: the Apatosaurus and the Brontosaurus skeletons were really similar, So
Speaker 1: similar that the scientific community deemed the Brontosaurus excels Us
Speaker 1: an adult specimen of the Apatosaurus genus. So in nineteen
Speaker 1: o three, Brontosaurus lost its official status, but museums, it seems,
Speaker 1: didn't get the memo. Starting in nineteen o five, the
Speaker 1: Saura pods started seeing display around the world labeled Brontosaurus
Speaker 1: excels us, sometimes with a Camarasaurus head. It wasn't until
Speaker 1: the nineteen nineties that these pervasive mistakes were corrected at large.
Speaker 1: But the story or doesn't end there. In April of
Speaker 1: a group led by paleontologist Emmanuel Chop published a study
Speaker 1: analyzing eighty one sauropod specimens, including precise measurements of four
Speaker 1: hundred and seventy seven different physical features. According to their findings,
Speaker 1: they reported not only that Marsha's Brontosaurus excelsis skeleton had
Speaker 1: enough differences to be considered its own species, but that
Speaker 1: there should be two additional specimens in the Brontosaurus genus.
Speaker 1: For now, the Brontosaurus isn't back for sure. It's up
Speaker 1: to the scientific community to come to a consensus on
Speaker 1: whether Brontosaurus and a Patosaurus deserve their own separate genera.
Speaker 1: But the thunder lizard certainly wasn't a fake. Marsh was
Speaker 1: just kind of a jerk. Oh, I love this one. Uh.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was written by me and produced by Tyler clayg.
Speaker 1: Brain Stuff is production of I Heart Radio's host that
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