Brontosaurus versus Apatosaurus

Because Cope and Marsh were such rivals, they both strived to be the first to describe a new species of dinosaur, and to send the bones back east to their respective museums. Between the two of them, they managed to describe more than 130 species of dinosaurs! Because of the hurry to describe a new dinosaur--and, thus, receive the scientific aclaim of being its discoverer--Cope and Marsh often got a little sloppy. Some of the 130 plus species are actually duplicate descriptions of the same animal. Such is the case of Apatosaurus/Brontosaurus.

Apatosaurus, as it is now known, is a sauropod (see my article "Dinosaur Primer" for more information about sauropods), a quadrupedal (it walked on four legs) herbivore (plant eater) that lived during the Cretaceous Period (140 to 65 million years ago). Apatosaurus is in the Diplodocidae family of sauropods, and was about 30 meters (about 97.5 feet) in length, with a small skull only 55 cm (about 22 inches) long.

In 1877, Marsh described and named Apatosaurus ajax. The name Apatosaurus means "deceptive lizard." In 1879, he described and named Brontosaurus, which means "thunder lizard." Marsh thought the two species were closely related, but were distinct enough to place them in different genera (the plural form of "genus").

Brontosaurs became more famous than Apatosaurs, mostly because of the skeleton that Marsh had excavated from Como Bluff, Wyoming, and mounted at the Yale Peabody Museum. It was, and still is, one of the most complete sauropod skeletons ever found. There was also an almost complete skeleton of Apatosaurus, and in 1903 a paleontologist named Elmer Riggs from the Field Museum in Chicago began to take another look at these two finds by Marsh.

Riggs determined that the Apatosaurus skeleton was actually a juvenile form of the same animal as Brontosaurus. Apatosaurus was the teenager, and Brontosaurus was the adult. So, what to do?

At that time, the rule of priority was strictly enforced by the Code, so Riggs declared that Apatosaurus, having been named in 1877, was the correct name for the genus. But, even though the name was changed way back in 1903, a lot of people preferred the name Brontosaurus. Biologists called it Apatosaurus in their scientific articles, but in the popular literature it was Brontosaurus.

Many people did not know that Brontosaurus had a different name until 1989, when the U.S. Postal Service released a series of 25 cent "dinosaur"

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