Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works. Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: it's Christian Seger. So our question for the day is
Speaker 1: did the Brontosaurus exist? And the short answer, yeah, sure did.
Speaker 1: But like so many answers, this one spawns a lot
Speaker 1: more questions. Is that really its correct name? How is
Speaker 1: it related to the apatosaurus? Wasn't it given the wrong skull?
Speaker 1: And if it did exist, was it delicious? Let's back up,
Speaker 1: We're gonna go to eighteen seventy seven. The confusion over
Speaker 1: the Brontosaurus stems partially from confusion in biological taxonomy, but
Speaker 1: also from a bitter rivalry of paleontologists. That's right, a
Speaker 1: rivalry between friends turned enemies whose battle for fame and
Speaker 1: power destroyed them. Both meet oath Neil Charles Marsh and
Speaker 1: Edward Drinker Cope everything about giving your kid a middle
Speaker 1: name like drink. They became good enough friends while studying
Speaker 1: natural history together that in the eighteen sixties they even
Speaker 1: named newly discovered fossils after each other. But Marsh was ambitious,
Speaker 1: like Slytherin, ambitious. When Cope showed him around a fossil
Speaker 1: quarry in camaraderie, Marsh struck a deal with the quarry
Speaker 1: owner behind Cope's back. All the fossils found there and
Speaker 1: the profits attached to them went straight to March, and
Speaker 1: it sparked what history calls the bone Wars. This was
Speaker 1: a fiery race to find and published papers about new
Speaker 1: ancient creatures. One of these creatures was the Apatosaurus A Jacks,
Speaker 1: a huge plant eater with a long neck and tail
Speaker 1: that Marsh discovered in eighteen seventy seven. The skeleton was incomplete,
Speaker 1: but Marsh wanted the credit for finding it, so he
Speaker 1: slapped on the head of another dinosaur found nearby, a Chimarasaurus,
Speaker 1: in his published reconstruction. Then in eighty five, Marsha's fossil
Speaker 1: collectors sent him a set of bones belonging to a larger,
Speaker 1: long necked, long tailed herbivore, a more complete set. Marsh
Speaker 1: decided it was a different animal and published his discovery
Speaker 1: of the Brontosaurus excels Us. His illustration of its skeleton
Speaker 1: was the first dinosaur sketch to receive wide lay circulation,
Speaker 1: and it caught the public's imagination. His haste was understandable.
Speaker 1: Cope was battling Marsha's superior connections by practicing what's been
Speaker 1: called taxonomic carpet bombing. He would publish four hundred articles
Speaker 1: in his fifty six years. The two former buddies slandered
Speaker 1: and sabotaged each other into financial and reputational ruin. Our
Speaker 1: friends over at stuff you missed in history class. Actually
Speaker 1: did a whole podcast to part in it if you
Speaker 1: want a deeper dive. But back to the Brontosaurus. Shortly
Speaker 1: after Cope and Marsha's deaths, a paleontologist studying Marsha's work
Speaker 1: noticed that the Apatosaurus and the Brontosaurus skeletons were really similar,
Speaker 1: so similar that the scientific community deemed the Brontosaurus Excelsus
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: sauropods started seeing display around the world labeled Brontosaurus excelsus,
Speaker 1: sometimes with a Camarasaurus head. It wasn't until the nineteen
Speaker 1: nineties that these pervasive mistakes were corrected at large. But
Speaker 1: the story doesn't end there. In April of fifteen, a
Speaker 1: group led by paleontologist Emmanuel Chop published a study analyzing
Speaker 1: eighty one sauropod specimens, including precise measurements of four hundred
Speaker 1: 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. Check out the brainstuff channel
Speaker 1: on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands of
Speaker 1: other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.