14 DAY TRIAL // A team of paleontologists from Portugal and the UK claim to have resurrected the Brontosaurus, otherwise known as the thunder lizard. No, they didn't grow such an ancient beast in the lab in some seriously messed-up genetic engineering experiment.
What they did was show that, contrary to what scientists ruled several decades back, the Brontosaurus really did exist as a distinct genus and was not just an Apatosaurus of sorts.
How paleontologists killed the Brontosaurus
In the 1870s, US paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh and his team recovered two humongous 150-million-years old partial skeletons from Wyoming and Colorado, respectively.
Having examined the fossilized dinosaur remains, the paleontologist classified one set as belonging to a species he named Apatosaurus ajax, i.e. the deceptive lizard, and another as belonging to one other species he decided to call Brontosaurus excelsus, i.e. the noble thunder lizard.
In 1903, however, one other paleontologist named Elmer Riggs reviewed his work and concluded that Apatosaurus ajax and Brontosaurus excelsus were too similar to be considered two distinct species belonging to two different genera, i.e. Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus.
As a result, Brontosaurus excelsus was moved to the genus Apatosaurus and became Aparosaurus excelsus, and the moniker Brontosaurus stopped being scientifically valid.
Resurrecting Brontosaurus, the thunder lizard
In a paper published in yesterday's issue of the journal PeerJ, a team of scientists led by paleontologists Emanuel Tschopp, Octávio Mateus, and Roger Benson present evidence that, contrary to what's been said since 1903, Brontosaurus excelsus was, in fact, a distinct species belonging to a self-standing genus.
The claim that Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were two distinct genera was based on a detailed analysis of dinosaur bones left behind by such creatures and unearthed by paleontologists in recent years.
“The differences we found between Brontosaurus and Apatosaurus were at least as numerous as the ones between other closely related genera, and much more than what you normally find between species," explains University of Oxford researcher Roger Benson.
Hence, the paleontologist and his colleagues argue that Brontosaurus should be viewed as a genus that, although similar to Apatosaurus, is nonetheless worthy of being called by its own name.
Brontosaurus was the odd one out for decades
Investigations carried out after Brontosaurus excelsus was reclassified as Apatosaurus excelsus showed that, rather than resemble its supposed siblings in this genus, the species actually looked more like dinosaurs belonging to another genus that populated the Earth around the same time.
Rather that consider the possibility that the species was included in the wrong genus, paleontologists settled for calling it an Apatosaurus with an odd, faulty head, Science Daily explains.
