Biggest Story Of The Year -- The Brontosaurus Is Back -- April 8, 2015

I would have posted the story anyway, but I am especially happy to be able to post this story for Don, who probably never gave up rooting for the Brontosaurus.

Scientific American is reporting:

Some of the largest animals to ever walk on Earth were the long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs known as the sauropods—and the most famous of these giants is probably Brontosaurus, the "thunder lizard."

Deeply rooted as this titan is in the popular imagination, however, for more than a century scientists thought it never existed.

The first of the Brontosaurus genus was named in 1879 by famed paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh. The specimen still stands on display in the Great Hall of Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History. In 1903, however, paleontologist Elmer Riggs found that Brontosaurus was apparently the same as the genus Apatosaurus, which Marsh had first described in 1877.

In such cases the rules of scientific nomenclature state that the oldest name has priority, dooming Brontosaurus to another extinction.

Now a new study suggests resurrecting Brontosaurus.

It turns out the original Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus fossils appear different enough to belong to separate groups after all.

"Generally, Brontosaurus can be distinguished from Apatosaurus most easily by its neck, which is higher and less wide," says lead study author Emanuel Tschopp, a vertebrate paleontologist at the New University of Lisbon in Portugal. "So although both are very massive and robust animals, Apatosaurus is even more extreme than Brontosaurus."

I always knew they never should have "done away" with Brontosaurus. 

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Beautiful Walk

Yesterday I mentioned the beautiful stroll I took with our youngest granddaughter yesterday. Here is one of the views, just a few blocks from our apartment complex: