Putting the Thunder back!
by Jennifer Allen
Up until the 1870s, there were about 9 specimens of dinosaurs found in North America. They were not classified very well, and some were mixed bones with another dinosaurs. It was a mess! The first man to discover a full dinosaur skeleton was a man named Foulke who was working for a man named Edward Cope. They were working on a dig in some Marl pits in New Jersey and came across a complete Hadrosaurus. Also working for Cope were two men who were taking fossils from the site and selling to a rival from New York, Charles Marsh of Yale’s Peabody Natural History Museum. The problem was that Marsh hardly ever paid on time and he was miserly when it came to sharing information. This was the beginning of Paleontology in the United States and the start of the great Bone Wars!
While the West was having their own range wars, two men from the East Coast were having their own war over Dinosaur bones! It was the ultimate Nerd Challenge combining both science and a quest for history at the same time. The problem was that the competition heated up so much that they destroyed a lot by covering up finds, not sharing information about animals, and even getting into a rock throwing fest against the two different teams at one dig site!
One such casualty of this great war was the Brontosaurus or Thunder dinosaur! Marsh had been looking around for dinosaur bones on his own, but the expeditions were getting expensive. Yale had funded quite a few of his expeditions when he took along students, but towards the end he funded a lot of it himself or made his students pay. He also hired other men to look for sites for him. One such man was Arthur Lakes. Arthur Lakes was a geologist who worked for the Colorado School of Mines and sketched sites of the dinosaur digs. Marsh hired him to sketch bones and it was Lakes that found the large Saurian bone in the Morrison ridgeback that started the great bone wars!
Although Marsh was considered an expert of his time in classification and was well respected for his ability to name them, this Brontosaurus would be the challenge of his lifetime. He discovered the bones at a site where there were other dinosaurs in the area and unknown to him, some of the bones he placed with this skeleton were from another kind of dinosaur. This later caused Elmer Riggs in 1903 to think that the Brontosaurus and the Apatosaurus were the same. This theory stuck and the term Brontosaurus was lost to the scientific community. However, Brontosaurus was too popular with the public to be lost because of a classification. Brontosaurus was around as common name for sauropods in everything from cartoons to illustrations.
By the 1970s, the theory was approached again as they went back over the bones from the original expedition. It was then that they discovered that the skeleton was two different dinosaurs that were put together. Because it was so hard to find any kind of a head for a Brontosaurus, it was assumed that they were closely related to the Apatosaurus. They assumed that they were the same, but people kept digging for dinosaurs and Sauropods appeared in Museums all over the world.
Bob Bakker of the Houston Natural History Museum challenged this theory in the 1990s. Already challenging the modern theories of Dinosaurs in his book The Dinosaur Heresies: New Theories Unlocking the Mystery of the Dinosaurs and Their Extinction, he was beloved by most of his fans and consulted for information on the Jurassic Park movie. They liked him so much, the character Robert Burke was based on him according to the Houston Museum of Natural History. However, not even he could change the current view of the science world that a Brontosaurus is a separate species. In 2004, the National Science Museum monographs concluded that Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were the same.
Fast Forward to April 7, 2015. A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropod) by Emanuel Tschopp, Octávio Mateus, and Roger B.J. Benson was published in National Library of Medicine. For the past few years, Emanual and his team took several examples of specimens from many different collections all over the world and put them in a computer program designed to categorize them by bones. 81 species were examined, 477 skeletal bones total according to the National Geographic article released the same day. Emanual wasn’t really looking to prove or disprove anything; he was just building a database for comparison. The proof was in the bones that were collected. The Brontosaurus was not only a separate species, but the differences were also so stark that they were a separate genus as well! Mostly it was because of the placement of a hip bone and an ankle bone. At last, it was proven that the Brontosaurus was its own species of dinosaur!
The Brontosaurus was referred by one as the Dachshund of the sauropods. It is not as large as a Supersaurus or an Alamosaurus. It has short legs for any sauropod but is long from head to tail. Still, weighing in at an estimated 30+ tons is no small feat (pun intended) and 90 feet long made for a large dinosaur in any age. Its shorter legs meant that it could only eat from smaller conifers or from the growth around marshes. The only defense was the whiplike action of its tail. Other dinosaurs from the same family of sauropods had nodes on the spine giving the tail a nasty smacking action. It was not as helpless as one might think.
It was mentioned in the first season of Clash of the Dinosaurs that the hardest part of being a sauropod came as a youth growing up. Shorter then most and without much of a whip to its tail, the chances for survival were not that good. That is why it is supposed that they lay several hundred eggs at a time so that the chances for a few to survive were greater. It didn’t help that the adult herds would move on after laying the eggs and leaving them totally helpless. The Brontosaurus has weathered a lot down through the years from being hunted as a youth, being hit with asteroids, and finally getting caught up in the start of the Bone Wars…but despite all of this, it came out victorious once again. As one scientist put it,
they put the Thunder back into the dinosaur.
While the West was having their own range wars, two men from the East Coast were having their own war over Dinosaur bones! It was the ultimate Nerd Challenge combining both science and a quest for history at the same time. The problem was that the competition heated up so much that they destroyed a lot by covering up finds, not sharing information about animals, and even getting into a rock throwing fest against the two different teams at one dig site!
One such casualty of this great war was the Brontosaurus or Thunder dinosaur! Marsh had been looking around for dinosaur bones on his own, but the expeditions were getting expensive. Yale had funded quite a few of his expeditions when he took along students, but towards the end he funded a lot of it himself or made his students pay. He also hired other men to look for sites for him. One such man was Arthur Lakes. Arthur Lakes was a geologist who worked for the Colorado School of Mines and sketched sites of the dinosaur digs. Marsh hired him to sketch bones and it was Lakes that found the large Saurian bone in the Morrison ridgeback that started the great bone wars!
Although Marsh was considered an expert of his time in classification and was well respected for his ability to name them, this Brontosaurus would be the challenge of his lifetime. He discovered the bones at a site where there were other dinosaurs in the area and unknown to him, some of the bones he placed with this skeleton were from another kind of dinosaur. This later caused Elmer Riggs in 1903 to think that the Brontosaurus and the Apatosaurus were the same. This theory stuck and the term Brontosaurus was lost to the scientific community. However, Brontosaurus was too popular with the public to be lost because of a classification. Brontosaurus was around as common name for sauropods in everything from cartoons to illustrations.
By the 1970s, the theory was approached again as they went back over the bones from the original expedition. It was then that they discovered that the skeleton was two different dinosaurs that were put together. Because it was so hard to find any kind of a head for a Brontosaurus, it was assumed that they were closely related to the Apatosaurus. They assumed that they were the same, but people kept digging for dinosaurs and Sauropods appeared in Museums all over the world.
Bob Bakker of the Houston Natural History Museum challenged this theory in the 1990s. Already challenging the modern theories of Dinosaurs in his book The Dinosaur Heresies: New Theories Unlocking the Mystery of the Dinosaurs and Their Extinction, he was beloved by most of his fans and consulted for information on the Jurassic Park movie. They liked him so much, the character Robert Burke was based on him according to the Houston Museum of Natural History. However, not even he could change the current view of the science world that a Brontosaurus is a separate species. In 2004, the National Science Museum monographs concluded that Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were the same.
Fast Forward to April 7, 2015. A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropod) by Emanuel Tschopp, Octávio Mateus, and Roger B.J. Benson was published in National Library of Medicine. For the past few years, Emanual and his team took several examples of specimens from many different collections all over the world and put them in a computer program designed to categorize them by bones. 81 species were examined, 477 skeletal bones total according to the National Geographic article released the same day. Emanual wasn’t really looking to prove or disprove anything; he was just building a database for comparison. The proof was in the bones that were collected. The Brontosaurus was not only a separate species, but the differences were also so stark that they were a separate genus as well! Mostly it was because of the placement of a hip bone and an ankle bone. At last, it was proven that the Brontosaurus was its own species of dinosaur!
The Brontosaurus was referred by one as the Dachshund of the sauropods. It is not as large as a Supersaurus or an Alamosaurus. It has short legs for any sauropod but is long from head to tail. Still, weighing in at an estimated 30+ tons is no small feat (pun intended) and 90 feet long made for a large dinosaur in any age. Its shorter legs meant that it could only eat from smaller conifers or from the growth around marshes. The only defense was the whiplike action of its tail. Other dinosaurs from the same family of sauropods had nodes on the spine giving the tail a nasty smacking action. It was not as helpless as one might think.
It was mentioned in the first season of Clash of the Dinosaurs that the hardest part of being a sauropod came as a youth growing up. Shorter then most and without much of a whip to its tail, the chances for survival were not that good. That is why it is supposed that they lay several hundred eggs at a time so that the chances for a few to survive were greater. It didn’t help that the adult herds would move on after laying the eggs and leaving them totally helpless. The Brontosaurus has weathered a lot down through the years from being hunted as a youth, being hit with asteroids, and finally getting caught up in the start of the Bone Wars…but despite all of this, it came out victorious once again. As one scientist put it,
they put the Thunder back into the dinosaur.