When you think of a giant dinosaur with a tiny head and long, swooping tail, the Brontosaurus is probably what you're seeing in your mind. But hold on: - scientifically speaking, there's no such thing as a Brontosaurus.
How this fictional dinosaur came to star in the prehistoric landscape of popular imagination for so long, dates back 130+ years, to a period of early U.S. paleontology known as the Bone Wars.
The Bone Wars was the name given to a bitter competition between two paleontologists, Yale's O.C. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope of Philadelphia. It has been said that their mutual dislike, paired with their scientific ambition, led them to race dinosaur names into publication, each trying to outdo the other.
The two burned through money, and were as much fame-hungry trailblazers as scientists. In the heat of this competition, in 1877, Marsh discovered the partial skeleton of a long-necked, long-tailed, leaf-eating dinosaur he dubbed Apatosaurus. It was missing a skull, so in 1883 when Marsh published a reconstruction of his Apatosaurus, he used the head of another dinosaur to complete the skeleton.
Two years later, his fossil collectors that were working out West sent him a second skeleton that he thought belonged to a different dinosaur that he named "Brontosaurus." But it wasn't a different dinosaur. It was simply a more complete Apatosaurus — one that Marsh, carelessly and quickly mistook for something new.
I guess a bronto-cacho-saurus doesn’t exist either - but then again...!!
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