Did the Brontosaurus Exist?

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 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 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

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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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.

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.