Brontosaurus

Molly Cule · 3141. Thu Dec 11, 2003 6:20 pm

There is no such thing as a Brontosaurus or “thunder Lizard”. This particular dinosaur is a combination of the body of the Apatosaurus (“deceptive lizard”) and the head of a Camarasaurus. The mistake was made in 1874 by an American paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh in his haste to beat rival Edward Drinker Cope in their race to discover new species of extinct animals.

The two men began working as friends but soon fell out, allegedly when Marsh paid some of Cope’s hired diggers to send fossil bones to him instead of their employer. For the next twenty years the two engaged in “the Bone Wars” or “The great bone rush”- they attacked each other in the press, had their fossil collecting crews spy on one another and stole each others fossils.

The “Bone Wars” benefited paleontology; when the war began only 18 dinosaur species were known from North America. In the course of their careers the two men described over 130 species and found piles of fossils which are now in the Peabody Museum in Yale, the Smithsonian Institution and the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia where Cope worked. The bones helped followers of Darwin’s theory of evolution fill in gaping holes in fossil records. In 1877 Marsh suggested birds were descended from dinosaurs. This theory was revived in the 1960’s and is the most popular theory of the evolution of birds.

In 1905 the skeleton of the wrongly named and wrongly headed Brontosaurus was put on display in Yale’s Peabody Museum where Marsh had a chair. This was the first exhibition of a sauropod skeleton in the world.

It was not until 1974 that the name Brontosaurus was discarded (some scientists still use the name when referring to the Apatosaurus).

Flash · 3143. Thu Dec 11, 2003 6:42 pm

Link to "brachiosaurus" in post 1344

BobTheScientist · 3160. Thu Dec 11, 2003 11:08 pm

post 2334

Has a website that reports this fall out from the Bone Wars
Copeanus Marsh. Cope and Marsh were paleontologists engaged in a fossil-hunting "war" in the late 1800's. "-Anus" is a Latin word root for "ring", but with another obvious implication.
Anisonchus cophater Cope (Miocene mammal) Edward Cope wrote in a letter to Henry F. Osborn: "Osborn, it's no use looking up the Greek derivation of cophater, ... for I have named it in honor of the number of Cope-haters who surround me...." [Jane Pierce Davidson, 1997, The Bone Sharp; the life of Edward Drinker Cope, Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia Special Publication 17, p. 69]

Flash · 3434. Thu Dec 18, 2003 1:27 am

Sorry to keep banging on about brachiosaurs ("arm lizards"), but the Sauropoda sauropodomorpha saurischia, at 82ft long, 52ft high, and 50 tons in weight was the largest-ever land animal.

Flash · 3435. Thu Dec 18, 2003 1:27 am

The proverbially extinct race of dinosaurs persisted for 165 million years, more than 40 times longer than the time which has elapsed since the emergence of the earliest humanoids.

Source for this and the previous post: The Dinosaur Data Book by David Lambert, the Diaphragm Group, 1990.

Sophie J · 6390. Tue Mar 09, 2004 3:44 pm

Two new dinosaurs have just been discovered in Antarctica. One is the largest dinosaur ever to be unearthed on that continent at 2 metres tall and 9 metres long. It is a plant-eating, long-necked sauropod. Despite being the biggest found in Antarctica, it is small compared to ones found elsewhere that can be up to 30 metres long. It appears to have lived around 190 million years ago, making it one of the earliest known of its kind.
The other dinosaur is a predatory dinosaur which lived 70 million years ago. It is also around 2 metres tall which makes it very small for a carnivore.

s: New Scientist, 6th March 2004

eliotandersen75 · 12353. Sun Dec 19, 2004 12:13 am

The largest dinosaur ever was Argentiniosaurus, and as the name suggests, has been found in South America. It was a herbivore. The largest carnivorous dinosaur ever lived in the same places and at the same time as Argentiniosaurus. These monsters were called Giganautosaurus.